NoIndex user generated pages?
-
Hi,
I have a site, downorisitjustme (dot) com
It has over 30,000 pages in google which have been generated by people searching to check if a specific site is working or not and then possibly adding a link to a msg board to the deeplink of the results page or something which is why the pages have been picked up.
Am I best to noindex the res.php page where all the auto generated content is showing up and just have the main static pages as the only ones available to be indexed?
-
Yes, add it to the robots.txt (use a Disallow and a NoIndex statement). I did find that Bing for example has not reliably in the past honoured robots.txt (especially in the case where you have an explicit "index" tag on the page and a noindex for a URL path).
-
Thanks for the replies Gerg & Irving.
The robots.txt block/exclude I take it I can just do that to the res.php page and not have to individually for the 30k generated dynamic pages off it (probably a silly question I know but wanted to double check).
-
I'd noindex the page, block in robots.txt, make sure your sitemap.xml is not generating these URLs if automated, and if there is a main folder where all the user generated pages are then request removal of that content in Google WMT.
-
I would also exclude them via robots.txt and then push through a sitemap with your static content to "nudge" Google to recrawl your content (and hopefully drop the other pages off quickly over time).
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
-
Issue with Cached pages
I have a client who has a three domains:
Technical SEO | | paulbaguley
budgetkits.co.uk
prosocceruk.co.uk
cheapfootballkits.co.uk Budget Kits is not active but Pro Soccer and Cheap Football Kits are. The issue is when you do site:budgetkits.co.uk on Google it brings back results. If you click on the link it goes to page saying website doesn't exist which is correct but if you click on cached it shows you a page from prosocceruk.co.uk or cheapfootballkits.co.uk. The cached pages are very recent by a couple of days ago to a week. The first result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/rainwear but the cached page is www.prosocceruk.co.uk/rainwear The third result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/kids-football-kits but the cached page is http://www.cheapfootballkits.co.uk The history of this issue is that budgetkits.co.uk was its own website 7 years ago and then it used to point at prosocceruk.co.uk after that but it no longer does for about two months. All files have been deleted from budgetkits.co.uk so it is just a domain. Any help with this would be very much appreciated as I have not seen this kind of issue before.0 -
Why are my page titles not being honored?
If you view source you will see my actual title tag http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/performance-advisor/sql-server-performance The google results are showing a completely different title tag that we do not want used. This was working properly and I'm not understanding how it got changed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
How to make my good sub-page rank ahead of my generic home page?
I have an ecommerce site for the clothes drying racks my family business makes, and it sells a few other laundry items also. It's about 5 years old. We used to rank on the first page for basic phrases like "clothes drying rack" and "umbrella clothesline". About 1.5 years ago we fell hard in the rankings. Since then "umbrella clothesline" has moved back to the first page, but "clothes drying rack" is stuck on the 3rd page and always with the result being the generic homepage instead of the good sub-page (which used to rank on the first page) that really shows-n-tells about our drying rack. Here are the three pages I am talking about. Home page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/ Drying rack page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html and umbrella clothesline page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/umbrella-clotheslines.html Any ideas on how to get the drying rack page to start ranking well again? (hopefully better than the generic homepage ranks) A little technical background: the Moz campaign on this site says that the home page has a PA = 42 with 190 LRD's and 344 external links. Both the umbrella clothesline page and the clothes drying rack page have almost equal statistics of PA = 35 with 20 LRD's and 23 external links. My anchor text distribution is maybe unbalanced. The drying rack page has 15 external links with the anchor of "Clothes Drying Rack". But the umbrella clothesline page has 14 external links with the anchor of "outdoor umbrella clothesline" and it ranks on the first page for that search. I can't figure out how to get OSE to tell me anchor text stats for just the homepage and not the whole site since www.bestdryingrack.com/index.html 301's to the plain www.bestdryingrack.com (if you know how, please share) What's wrong with my poor neglected clothes drying rack page? The only way I can get it to show up on the first page is to do a real specific search like "round wooden clothes drying rack" Your help could save a faltering family business. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
User Reviews Question
On my e-commerce site, I have user reviews that cycle in the header section of my category pages. They appear/cycle via a snippet of code that the review program provided me with. My question is...b/c the actual user-generated content is not in the page content does the google-bot not see this content? Does it not treat the page as having fresh content even though the reviews are new? Does the bot only see the code that provides the reviews? Thanks in advance. Hopefully this question is clear enough.
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
Renaming of pages
About 2 months ago one of our clients renamed a section of his website. The worst part is that the URLs of the page also changed. New page: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo Old page: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe The problem now is that the new page get absolutely no page-rank transfered from the old page. It also get no mozrank at all. Also if I try to find it in the Open Site Explorer it can not be found.The old page can, but not the new one. We have updated the sitemap.xml and also done proper 301 redirect for the pages since about 2 months. Any ideas here? This page was a very important page in terms of traffic so very much thankful for any input. Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
Backlinks to home page vs internal page
Hello, What is the point of getting a large amount of backlinks to internal pages of an ecommerce site? Although it would be great to make your articles (for example) strong, isn't it more important to build up the strength of the home page. All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong. Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is this 404 page indexed?
I have a URL that when searched for shows up in the Google index as the first result but does not have any title or description attached to it. When you click on the link it goes to a 404 page. Is it simply that Google is removing it from the index and is in some sort of transitional phase or could there be another reason.
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
On Page 301 redirect for html pages
For php pages youve got Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Technical SEO | | shupester
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?> Is there anything for html pages? Other then Or is placing this code redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.php in the .htaccess the only way to properly 301 redirect html pages? Thanks!0