NOINDEX,FOLLOW on product pages
-
Hi
Can I have people's thoughts on something please. We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level. So imagine we have three ranges
Range 1 - A Bird
Range 2 - A Heart
Range 3 - A Flower
Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc. The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower). However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match). Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar. We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call.
So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich. The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages.
Any thoughts on this one?
Gary
-
Thanks for helping me bounce the ideas around. Always valuable comments from SeoMozzers! Have a good day!
-
Yes that's a very good idea. It is much stronger a signal in it's execution than the noindex/follow method given my concerns.
-
OK, thanks for your detailed response.
I am wondering whether I might just have a dynamically generated URL for the "product level" pages, i.e. page.php?id=1, page.php?id=2 etc and then have a canonical tag that is the same across them all. I could then limit the product pages to those that are genuinely different in some way. That way, I can avoid the noindex,follow issue, have very few duplicate product pages and avoid Panda related issues. Sound sensible?
Gary
-
The issue with a high volume of noindex,follow pages is understanding intent, and potentially having the message be confused. "We have x pages with noindex, follow - meaning "we don't think these pages are important enough to index, but the links on them are". Except if those links exist elsewhere, on enough indexed pages, what's the point being made?
Is it an attempt to artificially boost the signals for those pages that are linked by saying "look at all these extra links we have pointing to these other pages"? That's the concern especially since the implementation of over-optimization factors in algorithms. While it may not be Google's intent to devalue a site due to innocent behavior, their ability algorithmically to understand is limited.
Over the past year and a half I've seen more and more situations where Google's many layers of algorithmic decisions have resulted in client sites suffering because of a lack of human review that can determine "this was not an intentional attempt to over-optimize". I've seen it with internal linking, I've seen it when use of noindex/follow conflicts with canonical signals, and I've seen it where either of those conflicts with robots.txt instructions.
While no single case is guaranteed to be problematic (due to hundreds of factors being evaluated across multiple algorithms), at the same time, as a professional audit consultant I am not comfortable enough to then leave out the consideration where no single case is guaranteed to be safe either. Thus, my opinion of "best practices" is to "avoid potentially significant problems".
-
Alan Thanks for this. Can I check I understand your comments. Are u suggesting that a large number of noindex, follow pages causes google to lose interest in following the links from those pages? Do u know this to be the case through an empirical study? I like your suggestion of integrating the product purchase onto the category pages. I agree that would be ideal but the products themselves have alot of options and some are designed online so it could end up quite complex. Food for thought though as it would be a good solution SEO wise. I'm just a little concerned on a user ability front. Gary
-
One alternate method would be to integrate the products onto their individual "range" pages, with purchase capability and options right there. You'd need to ensure the overwhelming majority of those pages is still unique, however it would avoid potential confusion that comes from "noindex,follow" being used on a massive scale, which can itself be problematic. (Google needs to understand WHY there are so many nonidex pages, and what unique links exist on those pages that you want the crawler to follow them for).
-
Sounds like it makes sense and that you have thought it out. If the category pages are conversion friendly, sounds like it can be done. But if there is a way you can get the product pages to have unique content I would personally prefer the product pages to rank. By doing what you are suggesting you're putting the point of purchase a click further away, which isn't the end of the world.
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
-
Robots.txt vs. meta noindex, follow
Hi guys, I wander what your opinion is concerning exclution via the robots.txt file.
Technical SEO | | AdenaSEO
Do you advise to keep using this? For example: User-agent: *
Disallow: /sale/*
Disallow: /cart/*
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /wishlist/* Or do you prefer using the meta tag 'noindex, follow' instead?
I keep hearing different suggestions.
I'm just curious what your opinion / suggestion is. Regards,
Tom Vledder0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Page Juice not moving???
Moved URL's from ldnwicklesscandles.com to ldnwicklesscandles.co.uk because I wanted to rank better for UK where I'm located and thought also the .co.uk for my competitors may have been giving them the advantage. Use Squarespace 7 (transferred over from SS5)----they told me to set primary domain to .co.uk and I've done it. I've also done a 301 redirect and done a change of address in webmaster tools although I'm not sure if all of this is needed? Squarespace seem to think just setting the primary domain is enough. My question is its been a couple of weeks, I've resubmited to Google webmaster to try to speed things up, the new URL is appearing in Google but none of my Page Juice seems to be transferring yet? How long will it take? I know not all the juice will move over but my PA/DA is non existent now and I have no idea if I'm just being impatient or I've done something wrong here. Not a Pro, Just a small biz owner here so forgive me if this has been asked before.
Technical SEO | | ldnwickless0 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
How come only 2 pages of my 16 page infographic are being crawled by Moz?
Our Infographic titled "What Is Coaching" was officially launched 5 weeks ago. http://whatiscoaching.erickson.edu/ We set up campaigns in Moz & Google Analytics to track its performance. Moz is reporting No organic traffic and is only crawling 2 of the 16 pages we created. (see first and third attachments) Google Analytics is seeing hundreds of some very strange random pages (see second attachment) Both campaigns are tracking the url above. We have no idea where we've gone wrong. Please help!! 16_pages_seen_in_wordpress.png how_google_analytics_sees_pages.png what_moz_sees.png
Technical SEO | | EricksonCoaching0 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
How many pages should my site have?
Right now I think I only have 36. What is a good amount of pages to have? Any ideas on ways to add relevant pages to my site? I was thinking about starting a message board. Also, I have a free tech support chat room, and was thinking about posting the logs somewhere on the site. Does that sound like a good idea? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
Which pages to "noindex"
I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on. I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on: legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
Technical SEO | | mmaes
search results page
blog archive and category pages Thanks for any insight of this.0