Can I noindex most of my site?
-
A large number of the pages on my site are pages that contain things like photos and maps that are useful to my visitors, but would make poor landing pages and have very little written content. My site is huge. Would it be benificial to noindex all of these?
-
You have pretty much answered this question yourself by saying that the would make poor landing pages. If that is the case, and they are useful for site users, but not for search then, yeah, noindex them.
There is no need to nofollow those links either, you can if you want, but I don't see the point as the crawlers will hit your page, see the noindex tag and ignore it.
-
As these pages only have a sentence or two of unique content each (e.g. a photo caption), they are pretty much duplicate pages. This is why I think they might be harming my site after the UK Panda Update. I have now noindexed them all, but is it bad to have the majority of pages on your site as noindex? Should I also nofollow the links to them so that Google is less likely to see them?
I appreciate your help.
-
We had an SEO guru at our etailing meeting yesterday and he said the problem is DUPLICATE pages, not the number. He told a woman with 4000 pages not to worry about nofollows unless there were duplications.
-
There are definitely no links to those pages, so I have nothing to lose there.
-
Just a thought, but I'd make sure there aren't any incoming links to those pages. I don't know if google would see them on a nofollow page. And we know how much we love incoming links1
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
-
Content from Another Site
Hi there - I have a client that says they'll be "serving content by retrieving it from another URL using loadHTMLFile, performing some manipulations on it, and then pushing the result to the page using saveHTML()." Just wondering what the SEO implications of this will be. Will search engines be able to crawl the retrieved content? Is there a downside (I'm assuming we'll have some duplicate content issues)? Thanks for the help!!
Technical SEO | | NetStrategies1 -
Can you keep you old HTTP xml sitemape when moving to HTTPS site wide?
Hi Mozers, I want to keep the HTTP xml sitemape live on my http site to keep track of indexation during the HTTPS migration. I'm not sure if this is doable since once our tech. team forces the redirects every http page will become https. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Hi Team, I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Can Google Crawl This Page?
I'm going to have to post the page in question which i'd rather not do but I have permission from the client to do so. Question: A recruitment client of mine had their website build on a proprietary platform by a so-called recruitment specialist agency. Unfortunately the site is not performing well in the organic listings. I believe the culprit is this page and others like it: http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs/?st=0&o3=973&s=1&o4=1215&sortdir=desc&displayinstance=Advanced Search_Site1&pagesize=50000&page=1&o1=255&sortby=CreationDate&o2=260&ij=0 Basically as soon as you deviate from the top level pages you land on pages that have database-query URLs like this one. My take on it is that Google cannot crawl these pages and is therefore having trouble picking up all of the job listings. I have taken some measures to combat this and obviously we have an xml sitemap in place but it seems the pages that Google finds via the XML feed are not performing because there is no obvious flow of 'link juice' to them. There are a number of latest jobs listed on top level pages like this one: http://www.prospect-health.com/optometry-jobs and when they are picked up they perform Ok in the SERPs, which is the biggest clue to the problem outlined above. The agency in question have an SEO department who dispute the problem and their proposed solution is to create more content and build more links (genius!). Just looking for some clarification from you guys if you don't mind?
Technical SEO | | shr1090 -
Another client copies everything to blogspot. Is that what keeps her site from ranking? Or what? Appears to be a penalty somewhere but can't find it.
This client has a brand new site: http://www.susannoyesandersonpoems.com Her previous site was really bad for SEO, yet at one time she actually ranked on the first page for "LDS poems." She came to me because she lost rank. I checked things out and found some shoddy SEO work by a very popular Wordpress webhoste that I will leave unnamed. If you do a backlink analysis you can see the articles and backlinks they created. But there are so few, so I'm not sure if that was it, or it just was because of the fact that her site was so poorly optimized and Google made a change, and down she fell. Here's the only page she had on the LDS poems topic in her old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130820161529/http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Even the links in the nav were bad as they were all images. And that ranked in position 2 I think she said. Even with her new site, she continues to decline. In fact she is nowhere to be found for main keywords making me think there is a penalty. To try and build rank for categories, I'm allowing google to index the category landing pages and had her write category descriptions that included keywords. We are also listing the categories on the left and linking to those category pages. Maybe those pages are watered down by the poem excerpts?? Here's an example of a page we want to rank: http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Any help from the peanut gallery?
Technical SEO | | katandmouse0 -
How can you get the right site links for your site?
Hello all, I have been trying to get Google to list relevant site links for my site when you type in our brand name, Loco2 or for when Loco2 comes up in a search result. Different things come up when you search Loco2 and Loco 2. We would like site links to look like how they do when you search Loco 2. However Loco2 is our brand name, NOT Loco 2. Does anyone know why Google is doing this and whether we can influence results? We have done as much as possible via Google webmaster, in terms of specifying the links we DO NOT want Google to list for Loco2. However, when you search "Loco2", results only show simple site links. Ideally what we want is: Loco2 to be recognised as the brand NOT Loco 2 The same results (substantial, identical) for Loco2 as for Loco 2 (think o2 and o 2) For the site links to reflect the main pages of our site (Times & Tickets, Engine Room forum etc.) Many thanks in advance! Anila
Technical SEO | | anilababla0 -
Basic Multi-Site Question
Newb question. We run a site in multiple cities under the same domain. Often times one city will provide content that is "syndicated" to other cites. For example, here is the master post: http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/ The content will also show up in the following domains: http://atlanta.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/ http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/ Should I be marketing the posts in Atlanta and Birmingham as "no index, no follow" for SEO purposes? Thanks in advance, Jay
Technical SEO | | SSBCI0 -
Can you 404 any forms of URL?
Hi seomozzers, <colgroup><col width="548"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form | These are duplicate content and the canonical version is: http://www.ex.com/user (login and pass page of the website) Since there were multiple other duplicates which mostly have been resolved by 301s, I figured that all "LOGIN" URLs (above) should be 404d since they don't carry any authority and 301 those wouldn't be the best solution since "too many 301s" can slow down the website speed. But a member of the dev team said: "Looks like all the urls requested to '404 redirect' are actually the same page http://ex.com/user/login. The only part of the url that changes is the variables after the "?" . I don't think you can (or highly not recommended) make 404 pages display for variables in a url. " So my question is: I am not sure what he means by that? and Is it really better to not 404 these? Thanks0