To noindex or not to noindex
-
Our website lets users test whether any given URL or keyword is censored in China. For each URL and keyword that a user looks up, a page is created, such as https://en.greatfire.org/facebook.com and https://zh.greatfire.org/keyword/freenet. From a search engines perspective, all these pages look very similar. For this reason we have implemented a noindex function based on certain rules. Basically, only highly ranked websites are allowed to be indexed - all other URLs are tagged as noindex (for example https://en.greatfire.org/www.imdb.com). However, we are not sure that this is a good strategy and so are asking - what should a website with a lot of similar content do?
- Don't noindex anything - let Google decide what's worth indexing and not.
- Noindex most content, but allow some popular pages to be indexed. This is our current approach. If you recommend this one, we would like to know what we can do to improve it.
- Noindex all the similar content. In our case, only let overview pages, blog posts etc with unique content to be indexed.
Another factor in our case is that our website is multilingual. All pages are available (and equally indexed) in Chinese and English. Should that affect our strategy?References:https://zh.greatfire.orghttps://en.greatfire.orghttps://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agreatfire.org
-
1. yes - if you no index all but 20 pages, those 20 pages would get a boost in rankings. You would end up losing the long tail searches from those other thousands of page - so you'll need to do some cost / benefit analysis on that.
2. you'll need to do a cost / benefit analysis on this one. Are most of the visitors to your site searching in Chinese or English? Are your search terms mainly in Chinese or mainly in English? Are your Chinese speaking visitors more likely to want to visit the .zh subdomain?
You could publish 20 to 50 pages on each subdomain, and then focus on doing some link building. If you have strong rankings across those 40 to 100 pages, then you could start adding more pages slowly over time.
-
Nops, no need to include the no index tag as adding canonical is an indication to Google that what are the original pages that search engine need to index and crawl so al other pages then category pages will be crawled automatically.
-
Hi Moosa. Thanks very much for your reply and great suggestions. If I add canonical tags on each URL page referencing the category page where it belongs, should I also add noindex tags on it? Should then actually all URL pages have noindex tags and only allow category pages to be indexed?
-
Thanks for suggestions. I have some follow-up questions. Would really like to know what you think about the following:
- The "page rank will get shared to all of the pages that you have across your site". In general, does this mean that if I add noindex tags to all but a few pages, they will be ranked much higher? Currently thousands of pages are indexed. Is it correct to say that if only say 20 pages were indexed that would greatly improve their ranking?
- The zh and en versions of the website have different templates and most of the text content is also translated (with the main exception of old blog posts). We could add noindex on all of the zh website or all except the main pages. Would you recommend that?
-
Ok I might sound completely stupid here as I never come across this case before but here is my hypothesis….
While searching for a keyword or URL you another field (may be a checkbox) that represents the category of search.
So, ones the new URL will generate it will come under the specific category automatically.
Customize the category pages so that they look different from each other.
Index the category pages and add canonical tag on any new generated URL of the category page. For example if the new page generates like www.yourwebsite.com/movies/ice-age -3/ this page should have the canonical tag to http://www.yourwebsite.com/movies/
Why?
Creating category pages will allow you more unique pages to get indexed in SERPs without the duplicate content issue. Adding canonical tag on all other URLs will tell category pages are the real pages that Google should consider.
This might help you cater more chances to earn more search traffic from Google.
**This is my assumption what I think should work!
-
Creating a page every time someone performs a search could probably spiral out of control pretty quickly. If you have a certain amount of 'page rank', based on all of the back links you have, that page rank will get shared to all of the pages that you have across your site.
One way you could more naturally control what gets indexed, is by what you link to from your home page. For instance, if you track the most blocked big sites, as well as the most blocked keywords, and have those pages 1 link from your homepage, you could expect those to get indexed naturally when your site is spidered.
As you get more links from other sites, and your trust from the search engines and page rank grows, you should be able to support more pages getting indexed across your site.
There is the issue of your site contents potentially being regarded as 'thin content', since many of the pages appear to be the same from page to page.
One question I had - I saw your site hosts both Chinese language words and English language words, and checks whether those words are being filtered. Perhaps it would make more sense to only show the words in Chinese characters on the zh. subdomain, and the English words on the en. subdomain? Just a thought. Is there any difference between the zh and en subdomains, aside from the language of the template?
Really interesting website.
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
-
Should I noindex my categories?
Hello! I have created a directory website with a pretty active blog. I probably messed this up, but I pretty much have categories (for my blog) and custom taxonomy (for different categories of services) that are very similar. For example I have the blog category "anxiety therapists" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety". 1- is this a problem for google? Can it tell the difference between archive pages in these different categories even though the names are similar? 2- should I noindex my blog categories since the main purpose of my site is to help people find therapists ie my custom taxonomy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Robots.txt vs noindex
I recently started working on a site that has thousands of member pages that are currently robots.txt'd out. Most pages of the site have 1 to 6 links to these member pages, accumulating into what I regard as something of link juice cul-d-sac. The pages themselves have little to no unique content or other relevant search play and for other reasons still want them kept out of search. Wouldn't it be better to "noindex, follow" these pages and remove the robots.txt block from this url type? At least that way Google could crawl these pages and pass the link juice on to still other pages vs flushing it into a black hole. BTW, the site is currently dealing with a hit from Panda 4.0 last month. Thanks! Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Noindex, rel=cannonical, or no worries?
Hello, SEO pros, We need your help with a case ↓ Introduction: Our website allows individual contractors to create a webpage where they can show what services they offer, write something about themselves and show their previous projects in pictures. All the professions and services assigned accordingly are already in our system, so users need to pick a profession and mark all services they provide or suggest those which we missed to add. We have created unique URLs for all the professions and services. We have internal search field and use a autocomplete to direct users to the right page. **Example: ** PROFESSION Carpenter (URL: /carpenters ) SERVICES Decking (URL: /carpenters/decking) Kitchens (URL: /carpenters/kitchens) Flooring and staircases (URL: /carpenters/flooring-and-staircases) Door trimming (URL: /carpenters/door-trimming) Lock fitting (URL: /carpenters/lock-fitting) Problem We want to be found by Google search on all the services and give a searchers a list of all carpenters in our database who can provide a service they want to find. We give 15 contractors per page and rank them by recommendations provided by their clients. Our concern is that our results pages may be marked as duplicate since some of them give the same list of carpenters. All the best 15 carpenters offer door-trimming and lock-fitting. So, all the same 15 are shown in /carpenters, /carpenters/lock-fitting, /carpenters/door-trimming. We don't want to be marked as spammers and loose points on domain trust, however we believe we give quality content since we gave what the searchers want to find - contractors, who offer what they need. **Solution? ** Noindex all service pages to avoid duplicate content indexed by Google OR rel=canonical tag on service pages to redirect to profession page. e.g. on /carpenters/lock-fitting page make a tag rel=canonical to /carpenters. OR no worries, allow Google index all the professions and services pages. Benefits of indexing it all (around 2500 additional pages with different keywords) is greater than ttagging service pages with no index or rel=canonical and loosing the opportunities to get more traffic by service titles. We need a solution which would be the best for our organic traffic 🙂 Many thanks for your precious time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | osvaldas0 -
Will disallowing in robots.txt noindex a page?
Google has indexed a page I wish to remove. I would like to meta noindex but the CMS isn't allowing me too right now. A suggestion o disallow in robots.txt would simply stop them crawling I expect or is it also an instruction to noindex? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Why is noindex more effective than robots.txt?
In this post, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo, it mentions that the noindex tag is more effective than using robots.txt for keeping URLs out of the index. Why is this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Canonical & noindex? Use together
For duplicate pages created by the "print" function, seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not) and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1