Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
-
Hello,
I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages.
Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow".
At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages.
Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter?
Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome.
Thank you!
Fabrizio
-
Julian, we sell digital sheet music and the additional 100,000 are products from Alfred music publishing company. Of course they will not be "high quality pages", but they are product pages, each one offering a piece of music. We are an e-commerce website, how can we avoid having product pages?! But of course, as Wesley said above, we can improve each product page quality content by giving more/custom information for each product, increasing user reviews, etc.
Other suggestions?
-
Thank you Wesley, yes, I think you are right. Our business is suffering really too much without traffic coming from the "noindex" pages, and after many months we still don't see recovery. I think the best approach would be probably to keep the pages in the index and differentiate them as much as we can.
Thank you!
-
Panda is probably the worst penalty to have. Very few site ever recover, even though site owner have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to solve it. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491
In this video, about 12.43 - matt cutts is clear, if you think its low quality 404 it, in other delete it.
May I ask why you want to keep these 180,000 pages live? And why are you planning to add another 100,000 pages? Surely they cant be high quality pages?
-
Fabrizo, as far as I know Google Panda is now part of the standard Google algorithm and it won't be a periodic event anymore. Penguin still is though.
If your product pages are duplicate content according to Google try and see if you can do something about that instead of no-indexing it. Is there no way you can update the products so they display a more prominent description? I understand that manually it's not a possibility because there are way too much products for that to be an option.
I did notice that on a lot of your product pages you have a standard text: "This item includes: PDF (digital sheet music to print), Scorch files (for online playing, transposition and printing), Videos, MIDI and Mp3 audio files (including <a title="This item includes Mp3 music accompaniment files.">Mp3 music accompaniment files</a>)*
Genre: classical
Skill Level: medium"Since this is basicly the only text on a lot of pages I think it's a big part of the problem. Maybe you can change this text so it looks different for every product?
Try tools like http://www.plagspotter.com/ to find the duplicate content and see which solution is best for your specific problem.
I hope i helped and if you need more help let me know
-
I understand what you mean and I agree with you in general, but specifically to our own website, I have no idea who put that link on that page, which is by the way a "nofollow" link. We never built links, all our incoming links are either natural and/or links from our own affiliates. I don't see much of "that stuff" on our back-link profile... am I in error?
Anyhow, yes, we are aware the situation is quite complex. Thank you again.
-
I actually looked at the competitors ranking #3 and #4 for the phrase "download sheet music" since your ranking 5th. Either way, its not a matter of too much or too little. It's how much of the link profile is authentic vs how much is made up of stuff like this....
http://www.dionneco.com/2011/02/love-is-a-parallax/
that's what I meant by fake links.
I think what you may be missing is how complex the situation really is. There's a lot more to be considered than a number in Open Site Explorer - which is actually only a portions of what's really out there.
You may also want to look at changes you can make on-site. I'm a firm believer that proper HTML, accessibility, UX and all that really matter.
-
Thank you Takeshi, I think you got the problem right. The "crawling" side of the issue is something I was thinking about too!
We are actually working on every aspect of our website to improve its content because we have suffered by Panda a lot in the past two years, so here is the strategy we begun to take since March:
1. "noindexing" most of our thin or almost-duplicate content to get it removed from the index
2. Improve our best content and differentiate it as much as we can with compelling content (this takes a long time!)
3. Consolidating similar pages with the use of canonical tags.
In order to tackle the "slower crawling" problem you have highlighted here, do you think that would be probably better for us to stop engines to crawl those pages altogether via robots.txt once they have been removed? Would that solve the crawl issue? I could do that at least with these new 100,000 new product pages we plan to add!
Thank you!
-
Wesley, that's because of being penalized by Panda several times in the past... so we are trying the "clean-up" strategy with the hope to be "de-penalized" by Panda at the next related algorithm update. Looks like we had too many "thin" or "almost duplicate" pages... that's why we removed so many pages from the index! But if we don't see improvements in the coming 1-2 months, I guess we'll put the product pages in the index because our business is suffering a big deal!
-
Colin, what do you mean with "fake links" exactly? Our link profile looks actually in better shape than our main competitors:
virtualsheetmusic.com (our site): links: 614,013 root domains: 2,233
sheetmusicplus.com (competitor): links: 5,322,596 root domains: 6,149 (worse than our profile!)
musicnotes.com (competitor): links: 6,527,429 root domains: 2,914 (much worse than our profile!)
Am I missing anything?
-
The discrepancy between noindexed/indexed pages is not in itself a problem. However having all those pages will present a challenge to Google, in terms of crawling. Even though the pages won't be indexed, Google will need to spend some of your limited crawl budget crawling all those pages.
Also, to recover from Panda it's necessary to not only noindex duplicate content, but improve your indexed content. That means things like consolidating similar pages into one page, writing unique content for your pages, and getting unique user-generated content such as reviews.
-
Why would you want to no-index your product pages? They seem like the kind of pages you want to get found on.
There shouldn't be a problem between the amount of index pages VS no-index pages except you won't get found on the no-index ones. Product pages tend to be the kind of pages that you REALLY want to get found on.
I think you should rethink your strategy to recover from the penalties.
Try to find out where exactly the penalties came from and fix the errors in that area of our website. -
Can't say I've been in that situation, but search engines seem to interpret that tag as an on/off situation. and I think you probably know that your problems aren't related to or able to be solved by robots meta tags.
You need less fake links. OSE finds well over half a million links from 3K root domains to your site. Look at your competitors - a few thousand links from a handful of domains.
It's a shame because it seems like the internet wanted to make you the authority naturally - You've got a handful of really solid links coming in. If you could shed the spam somehow you'd be doing a lot better.
So yea, stating the obvious, I know. best of luck to you and hope the site recovers!
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
-
How to index your website pages on Google 2020 ?
Hey! Hopefully, everyone is fine here I tell you some step how you are index your all website pages on Google 2020. I'm already implementing these same steps for my site Boxes Maker. Now Below I'm giving you some steps for indexing your website pages. These are the most important ways to help Google find your pages: Add a sitemap. ... Make sure people know your site. ... Ensure full navigation on your site. ... Apply the indexing application to your homepage. ... Sites that use URL parameters other than URLs or page names may be more difficult to broadcast.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fbowable0 -
Can an "Event" in Structured Data For Google Be A Webinar?
I have a client who is has structured data for live business webinars. Google's documentation seems to talk more about music and tickets than this kind of thing. At the same time, we get an error in search console for "Name" and location, which they list as "webinar." Should I removed this failed structured data attempt or is there a way to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Weird indexing problem - Can it be solved?
Hi Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go: For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all. Just a recap of what we have tried so far: Add site to webmaster tools Add proper sitemap.xml Add 301 redirect to the correct URL An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed. Again, any help is very much appreciated. Kind regards Fredrik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resultify0 -
Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL. Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website? I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.0 -
Dealing with Redirects and iFrames - getting "product login" pages to rank
One of our most popular products has a very authoritative product page, which is great for marketing purposes, but not so much for current users. When current users search for "product x login" or "product x sign in", instead of getting to the login page, they see the product page - it adds a couple of clicks to their experience, which is not what we want. One of the problems is that the actual login page has barely any content, and the content that it does carry is wrapped around <iframes>. Due to political and security reasons, the web team is reluctant to make any changes to the page, and one of their arguments is that the login page actually ranks #1 for a few other products (at our company, the majority of logins originate from the same domain). </iframes> To add to the challenge - queries that do return the login page as #1 result (for some of our other products) actually do not reference the sign-in domain, but our old domain, which is now a 301 redirect to the sign-in domain. To make that clear - **Google is displaying the origin domain in SERPs, instead of displaying the destination domain. ** The question is - how do we get this popular product's login page to rank higher than the product page for "login" / "sign in" queries? I'm not even sure where we should point links to at this point - the actual sign in domain or the origin domain? I have the redirect chains and domain authority for all of the pages involved, including a few of our major competitors (who follow the same login format), and will be happy to share it privately with a Moz expert. I'd prefer not to make any more information publicly available, so please reach out via private message if you think you can help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leosaraceni0 -
How can a page be top rated for a phrase it does not have?
Hi, While looking to buy a Christmas gift to my wife I was searching for yellow diamonds. Being a bit familiar with SEO I gotta understand how the following page was ranked 4th for "yellow diamonds": http://www.bluenile.com/diamonds/fancy-color-diamonds The phrase yellow diamonds is not mentioned even once! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
"Duplicate" Page Titles and Content
Hi All, This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me! SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site. The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/ Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page. The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France": http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated. http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle. There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in. What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification. Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome. Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10