Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
-
Hello Community,
Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed.
We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000.
Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000.
When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report.
So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well.
Thanks for your feedback.
Chris
-
Unless a page can give value to a searcher (not just an existing customer) it shouldn't be in Google's search index.
Sometimes I like to go back to the basics. Remember that search engines exist to help people find information that they WANT to find. Realistically, people are not going to want to find every page on your websites in SERPS.I suggest you ask yourself this question; does this page offer information that someone would actually want to search for, and make your decision accordingly.
p.s. Having said all of that, I'll answer your question. The answer is yes, having thin pages on your site can hurt your domain. If your pages offer value to searchers, I suggest you improve them instead of remove them, but if they don't offer value to searchers don't waste your time, and just no-index them.
-
So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site?
Yes.
We had a site with some image content pages that had not a lot of text. They ranked great for years. Then, BAM, rankings across the site dropped on a Panda update.
We added noindex/follow to these pages, redirected some that were obsolete and our rankings came back with the next update.
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
-
PDFs With No Index Contribute To Page Ranks?
I have a question I'm hoping you can help me with. If I upload a PDF and add a no index under the meta robots index so that the PDF doesn't appear in search results when I send people the link to this PDF, does it still contribute to my site traffic/ranking etc? Basically we are deciding whether to put some PDFs with pricing options etc onto our website or on a google drive. We will be sending the links to potential clients. If visitors clicking on the link would still help with increasing traffic and increasing our google rank (without that PDF showing in results) we thought this might be the best solution.
Algorithm Updates | | whiterabbitnz0 -
Seeing some really bad sites that ranked in my niche years ago reaching 1st page
It started after the update about 4 websites form the 1st page dropped to the 2nd and 4 of the other sites just popped back to the 1st page and the bad part is that the Da and inbound links of these sites are really bad, so my question is must we just wait this out till Google realises how bad these site are and some of them haven't been updated in years links broken i can go on and on. what these sites have is just the age of the domains, but can this really be the main focus of these results?
Algorithm Updates | | johan80 -
Site:www Issue - Homepage of the website is not showing in Google
Hello everyone, When I have manually search site:www.blinds4uk.co.uk in google.co.uk to know about webpages status, home page of the website is not showing in google search engine result pages. Please let me know, what is the reason behind this? because website crawling and indexing is good. Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Kuldeep-Sharma0 -
Dealing with Omitted Page
For my most competitive term, the wrong page ranks (and not well either). The landing page I built for it has never shown up for that term except after I include the omitted results. The page that does rank is category page page above it. All that's fine, because neither page was all that great...BUT, I have completely re-written the content for the landing page, got local area pictures, local testimonials and a video. So here's my question: Should I put all that content on the landing page that's been omitted or tweak the page that ranks and put it there? To me it makes the most sense to put the content on the page that has been omitted, but I don't know how google treats pages that have been omitted in the past. Is it going to have some sort of bias against the page, because it was omitted so many times earlier for that keyword? Or, will it be treated just like any other page, and if the content is good enough, then it will rank just fine. If anyone's dealt with this, then I'd love to hear all about it! Thanks, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Duplicate Content
I was just using a program (copyscpape) to see if the content on a clients website has been copied. I was surprised that the content on the site was displaying 70% duplicated and it's showing the same content on a few sites with different % duplicated (ranging from 35%-80%) I have been informed that the content on the clients site is original and was written by the client. My question is, does Google know or understand that the clients website's content was created as original and that the other sites have copied it word-for-word and placed it on their site? Does he need to re-write the content to make it original? I just want to make sure before I told him to re-write all the content on the site? I'm well aware that duplicate content is bad, but i'm just curious if it's hurting the clients site because they originally created the content. Thanks for your input.
Algorithm Updates | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
New site or subdomain
what are pros and cons of launching a new product site as opposed to placing it under a subdomain of the company site? will the new site be placed in the google sandbox? the main goal is to provide credibility for the product, and by placing it under the company site that has been live for over 10 years. It is not a consumer product - more dealers. So people would be pushed to the site or find it through the brochure.
Algorithm Updates | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Google and Content at Top of Page Change?
We always hear about how Google made this change or that change this month to their algorithm. Sometimes it's true and other times it's just a rumor. So this week I was speaking with someone in the SEO field who said that this week a change occurred at Google and is going to become more prevalent where content placed at the "top of the fold" on merchant sites with products are going to get better placement, rather than if you have your products at top with some content beneath them at the bottom of the page. Any comments on this?
Algorithm Updates | | applesofgold0 -
Google +1 link on Domain or Page?
Since its release, I've seen Google +1 being used across an entire domain but only reference the root href in the code snippet. At the same time, you see other sites use +1 more naturally with the button being specific to the page you're on. What's your take on this? To clarfiy, do you add: or .. on each page.
Algorithm Updates | | noeltock0