Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
-
Hey folks,
How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls.
These pages are super low competition.
The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal)
a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned.
b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them?
c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned?
d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google.
Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info.
-
it's not a strategy, it's due to technical limitations on the dev side. i agree though thanks.
So, I asked this question to a very advanced SEO guru and he said they could be seen as doorways and present some risk and advised against it. That combined with the probability that they will most likely get dropped from Google's index anyway and we know that Google says they want pages to be part of the sites architecture has me leaning towards nofollowing all of them and maybe experiment with allowing 1000 to get indexed and see what happens with them.
Thanks for your input folks
-
I'd go back to the drawing board and rework your strategy.
Do you need additional sites? 150K orphaned pages you want indexed sounds spammy or poor site architecture to me.
-
Yikes, I didn't know the site was that big. Still, if you're afraid of how Google would "react" to those orphaned pages, I'd still test small, regardless of how large your overall site is.
-
Yea 1000 is probably a big enough sample.
10,000 seems like a lot i guess but not when you've got a site with 4.5 million pages.
-
yea submitting sitemap.xml files for 300k pages that are not part of the site seems a bit obnoxious.
-
we definitely want the 150k in the index since they are legitimate pages and linked to on the site. it's the 300k of orphaned ones we have to take along as a package deal that i am worried about. too many orphaned pages for Google.
-
That's a good idea. 10,000 Is still a lot. You could even test fewer than 10,000 pages. Why not try 1,000?
-
Hmmm. I am leaning towards the following solution since I would rather be on the cautious side, maybe this makes sense?
a) we noindex these 300k orphaned pages and do not submit sitemap.xml files
b) we experiment with say 10,000 pages and we allow only those to get indexed and submit sitemap.xml files for them
c) we closely monitor their indexing and ranking performance so we can determine if these are even worth opening up to Google and taking any risk.
-
In my opinion, add the 150k pages in the site map along with the 300k pages, let Google index all the pages and once they are all indexed , you can take a call on de indexing the 150k pages based on their traction.
-
I have no hard evidence, but if it were my site, I would do option C but keep an eye on what happens, and if I noticed anything strange happening, I would implement option B. But if option C makes you nervous, I see no reason you couldn't or shouldn't noindex them right off the bat.
That's merely one person's opinion, however.
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
-
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org. The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case. Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages. What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Removing pages from index
My client is running 4 websites on ModX CMS and using the same database for all the sites. Roger has discovered that one of the sites has 2050 302 redirects pointing to the clients other sites. The Sitemap for the site in question includes 860 pages. Google Webmaster Tools has indexed 540 pages. Roger has discovered 5200 pages and a Site: query of Google reveals 7200 pages. Diving into the SERP results many of the pages indexed are pointing to the other 3 sites. I believe there is a configuration problem with the site because the other sites when crawled do not have a huge volume of redirects. My concern is how can we remove from Google's index the 2050 pages that are redirecting to the other sites via a 302 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tinbum0 -
Why is a site no longer being indexed by Google after HTTPS switch?
A client of ours recently had a new site built and made the switch to HTTPS. We made sure to redirect all of the HTTP pages to HTTPS and submitted a new sitemap to Google. GWT says the sitemap was submitted successfully but only 4 pages have been indexed where there should be over 2000. This has led to a plummet of organic traffic and we can't find the issue. Has anyone else had issues/success with doing a HTTPS switch that knows how to fix this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
To index or de-index internal search results pages?
Hi there. My client uses a CMS/E-Commerce platform that is automatically set up to index every single internal search results page on search engines. This was supposedly built as an "SEO Friendly" feature in the sense that it creates hundreds of new indexed pages to send to search engines that reflect various terminology used by existing visitors of the site. In many cases, these pages have proven to outperform our optimized static pages, but there are multiple issues with them: The CMS does not allow us to add any static content to these pages, including titles, headers, metas, or copy on the page The query typed in by the site visitor always becomes part of the Title tag / Meta description on Google. If the customer's internal search query contains any less than ideal terminology that we wouldn't want other users to see, their phrasing is out there for the whole world to see, causing lots and lots of ugly terminology floating around on Google that we can't affect. I am scared to do a blanket de-indexation of all /search/ results pages because we would lose the majority of our rankings and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the ranks of our optimized static pages. The ideal is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages - but for some reason Google keeps choosing the internal search results page as the "better" page to rank for our targeted keywords. Can anyone advise? Has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Does Google make continued attempts to crawl an old page one it has followed a 301 to the new page?
I am curious about this for a couple of reasons. We have all dealt with a site who switched platforms and didn't plan properly and now have 1,000's of crawl errors. Many of the developers I have talked to have stated very clearly that the HTacccess file should not be used for 1,000's of singe redirects. I figured If I only needed them in their temporarily it wouldn't be an issue. I am curious if once Google follows a 301 from an old page to a new page, will they stop crawling the old page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin0 -
Old pages still in index
Hi Guys, I've been working on a E-commerce site for a while now. Let me sum it up : February new site is launched Due to lack of resources we started 301's of old url's in March Added rel=canonical end of May because of huge index numbers (developers forgot!!) Added noindex and robots.txt on at least 1000 urls. Index numbers went down from 105.000 tot 55.000 for now, see screenshot (actual number in sitemap is 13.000) Now when i do site:domain.com there are still old url's in the index while there is a 301 on the url since March! I know this can take a while but I wonder how I can speed this up or am doing something wrong. Hope anyone can help because I simply don't know how the old url's can still be in the index. 4cArHPH.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn70 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?
I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0
