Which pages to "noindex"
-
I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on.
I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on:
legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
search results page
blog archive and category pagesThanks for any insight of this.
-
Here are two posts that may be helpful in both explaining how to set up a robots.txt for wordpress, and the thinking behind setting up which parts to exclude.
http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization
The wordpress link (second link) has a link to several other resources as well.
-
Yes I'm using wordpress.
-
You also want to block any admin directory, plugin directory, etc. Are you using Wordpress or a specific CMS? There are often best-practice posts for robots.txt files for specific platforms.
-
yes, generally you would noindex your about us, contact us, privacy, terms pages since these are rarely searched and in fact are so heavily linked to internally that they would rank well if indexed.
all search results should be noindexed - google wants to do the search
definitely NOT blog/category pages - these are your gold content!
I also noindex any URL accessed by https
-
As well as pagination pages I have read, but not done it myself, that you should consider using it on low value pages that you are wouldn't want to rank above other pages on the site (hopefully they wouldn't anyway) and also sitemaps as don't necessarily want them to appear in the index but definitely want them followed.
-
Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.
-
I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy
-
Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors
-
Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these
Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.
-
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
-
Old pages not mobile friendly - new pages in process but don't want to upset current traffic.
Working with a new client. They have what I would describe as two virtual websites. Same domain but different coding, navigation and structure. Old virtual website pages fail mobile friendly, they were not designed to be responsive ( there really is no way to fix them) but they are ranking and getting traffic. New virtual website pages pass mobile friendly but are not SEO optimized yet and are not ranking and not getting organic traffic. My understanding is NOT mobile friendly is a "site" designation and although the offending pages are listed it is not a "page" designation. Is this correct? If my understanding is true what would be the best way to hold onto the rankings and traffic generated by old virtual website pages and resolve the "NOT mobile friendly" problem until the new virtual website pages have surpassed the old pages in ranking and traffic? A proposal was made to redirect any mobile traffic on the old virtual website pages to mobile friendly pages. What will happen to SEO if this is done? The pages would pass mobile friendly because they would go to mobile friendly pages, I assume, but what about link equity? Would they see a drop in traffic ? Any thoughts? Thanks, Toni
Technical SEO | | Toni70 -
Should I noindex pages on my website that are pulled from an API integration
SEO/Moz newbie here! My organisation's website (dyob.com.au), uses an API integration to pull through listings that are shown in the site search. There is a high volume of these, all of which only contain a title, image and contact information for the business. I can see these pages coming up on my Moz accounts with issues such as duplicate content (even if they are different) or no description. We don't have the capacity to fill these pages with content. Here's an example: https://www.dyob.com.au/products/nice-buns-by-yomg I am looking for a recommendation on how to treat these pages. Are they likely to be hurting the sites SEO? We do rank for some of these pages. Should they be noindex pages? TIA!
Technical SEO | | monica.arklay0 -
Using "Div's" to place content at top of HTML
Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Many "spin-off" sites - 301 or 401/410?
Hi there, I've just started a new job with a rental car company with locations all over New Zealand and Australia. I've discovered that we have several websites along the lines of "rentalcarsnewzealand", "bigsaverentals" etc that are all essentially clones of our primary site. I'm assuming that these were set up as some sort of "interesting" SEO attempt. I want to get rid of them, as they create customer experience issues and they're not getting a hell of a lot of traffic (or driving bookings) anyway. I was going to just 301 them all to our homepage - is this the right approach? Several of the sites are indexed by Google and they've been linked up to a number of sites - the 301 move wouldn't be to try to derive any linkjuice or anything of that nature, but simply to get people to our main site if they do find themselves clicking a link to one of those sites. Thanks very much for your advice! Nicole
Technical SEO | | AceRentalCars0 -
How can I Style Long "List Posts" in Wordpress?
Hi All, I have been working on a list-post which spans over 100 items. Each item on the list has a quick blurb to explain it, an image and a few resource links. I am trying to find an attractive way to present this long list post in Wordpress. I have seen several sites with long list posts however; they place their items one on top of the other which yields a VERY long page and the end user has to do a lot of scrolling. Others turn their lists into slideshows, but I have no data on how slides perform against 10-mile-long-lists which load in 1 page. I would like to do something similar to what List25.com does as they present about 5-10 items per page and they seem to have pagination. The pagination part I understand however; is there a shortcode plugin to format lists in an attractive way just like list25?
Technical SEO | | IvanC0 -
Why does my mobile site have a "?mobiRedirect=1" string at the end of the URL?
Hello, When trying to access my site from a smart-phone, I'm getting a redirected to the mobile version (which is correct), however at the end of the URL there is a redirect string that shows every time. I'm not sure why its its showing or how it automatically gets appended to the end of the URL each time. How can I configure my mobile site to prevent the ?mobiRedirect=1" from showing? For example, if you search for "Columbus Regional Health" on Google with a smart-phone, the first result should be for www.crh.org. If you click that, you should get redirected to www.crh.org/mobile , however its displaying the URL as http://www.crh.org/mobile/default.aspx?mobiRedirect=1 Does anyone know how to fix this? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Liamis
Brian0 -
International Websites: rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Hi people, I keep on reading and reading , but I won't get it... 😉 I mean this page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077&topic=2370587&ctx=topic On the bottom of the page they say: Step 2: Use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" Update the HTML of each URL in the set by adding a set of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link elements. Include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link for every URL in the set, like this: This markup tells Google's algorithm to consider all of these pages as alternate versions of each other. OK! Each URL needs this markup. BUT: Do i need it exactly as written above, or do I have to put in the complete URL of the site, like: The next question is, what happens exactly in the SERPS when I do it like this (an also with Step1 that I haven't copied here)? Google will display the "canonical"-version of the page, but wehen a user from US clicks he will get on http://en-us.example.com/**page.htm **??? I tried to find other sites which use this method, but I haven't found one. Can someone give me an example.website??? Thank you, thank you very much! André
Technical SEO | | waynestock0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300