NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
-
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site:
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/
Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions
Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied.
Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
-
We've taken the approach of adding rel="canonical" to all paginated content with the link pointing to the first page of results. We keep everything indexed and followed. We also help Google identify the URL parameter created for paginated content in our Webmaster Tool settings.
This has worked well for us, but another approach would be to add rel="next" and rel="prev" to the paginated links. This is openly supported by Google to handle pagination, but might be a little tricky to setup in your CMS.
Good luck!
Andrew
-
Noindex will take out the pages from the index of search engines. This will impact your traffic if your pages are already ranked.
As long as the category pages have different content, you will be fine. No need to remove them from the index unless you have specific requirement to do so.
For some reason, if you want only the first page to be ranked then go with the pagination hints which will consolidate your link value to the first page and most likely the first page will come up in the search result.
Note: Bing didn't officially endorse this practice and may be on its way.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ0 -
Structure of HTML Page
Hello, Is is true that search engine give more value to some part of the page than other ? Is only the main content considered ? or are the other also given weight but very small weight ? If I have div in the main content as those considered par of the main content or no ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Page and Domain Authority
How much Page and Domain Authority we need to look for to secure a backlink.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Does an H1 have to be at the top of a page?
Because H1 "may" carry some weight with Google does it have to be placed at the top of the page? Can I place it towards the bottom of the page instead in normal body size? My goal is to keep the main keywords in the H1 but create a much friendlier title for the customer to read at the top of the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
No equivalent page to re-direct to for highly trafficked pages, what should we do?
We have several old pages on our site that we want to get rid of, but we don't want to 404 them since they have decent traffic numbers. Would it be fine to set up a 301 re-direct from all of these pages to our home page? I know the best option is to find an equivalent page to re-direct to, but there isn't a great equivalent.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0