Pages to be indexed in Google
-
Hi,
We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages.
Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone.
My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate.
If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow
Regards
-
Thank you Gagan!
-
Its a much better and clear explanation... +1 to it. Cheers !!
-
One key point on using robots.txt vs the meta tag noindex. It is not that the noindex meta tag is "superior" they just work differently.
If you use robots.txt - it will stop the spider from visiting that page, but it will not remove the page from the index. Also, if you have a page in robots.txt and on that page have a 301 redirect, or a canonical or a meta noindex Google will not see the page (due to the robots.txt directive) and then not be able to act on the 301 or canonical or the meta noindex.
A meta noindex, because the spider crawls the page, will not only tell Google not to visit the page anymore, but also tells Google to remove the page from the index. This is key if you want the pages removed from the Google index.
The rule of thumb I use is that
-
If you have a page that is not in the Google index and you want to keep it out of the index put that file in robots.txt.
-
If you have a page that is in the Google index and you want it removed, then use the noindex meta tag, do not put it into the robots.txt for reasons mentioned above. Over time, once the pages are removed (and this may take a while depending on how often the page is cralwed) then you can put into robots.txt for good measure.
-
-
In order to exclude individual pages from search engine indices, **the noindex meta tag **is actually superior to robots.txt.
-
Noindex is good or robots deny
Whats the difference or can do both?
-
If they have pretty low content or do not add any value and is not searched by users too
Will be better to add noindex so as to have search engines crawl your site in a better way.
-
if those are generating a high bounce rate I would block them for search engines. The easiest way is probably by a robots.txt
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Over 500 thin URLs indexed from dynamically created pages (for lightboxes)
I have a client who has a resources section. This section is primarily devoted to definitions of terms in the industry. These definitions appear in colored boxes that, when you click on them, turn into a lightbox with their own unique URL. Example URL: /resources/?resource=dlna The information for these lightboxes is pulled from a standard page: /resources/dlna. Both are indexed, resulting in over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content. My question is this: Should they be de-indexed? Another option I'm knocking around is working with the client to create Skyscraper pages, but this is obviously a massive undertaking given how many they have. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Rich Snippets for recipe pages not appearing in Google
We are building a baking website and have implemented rich snippets for our recipe posts. We noticed inconsistent results on competitor sites, and then noticed it was happening to our links as well. Our content has only been live for a week, I know it may take a couple weeks, but other sites that have had their content around for a while have this happening too. For example: When you use this tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets And put in this link (competitor): http://food52.com/recipes/864-deep-chocolate-cake-with-orange-icing and press "Preview," you'll see a nice rich snippet preview. Now go ahead and search for "Deep Chocolate Cake with Orange Icing" using Google, you will see that in the search results the image for this link is not appearing. This is happening to all of our links as well. Why? We are using the schema recipe format, but apparently that doesn't guarantee the image will appear in the actual search results. How does Google determine which images are displayed in rich snippets and which aren't?
Technical SEO | | bakepedia0 -
Does google know every time you change content on your page
What i mean by the question is, so on our home page www.in2town.co.uk we change the article under lifestyle story of the day, if this changes every hour, will this encourage google to visit that page more often or will then just ignore that and just visit each day would love to hear your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
How long does it take for an article or a page to be listed by google
Hi, my question is a two parter. I think i must be doing something wrong. With my site map, it is set to show different section of my site while on my old site the site map listed every single article - i am not sure if setting it to each section is correct, can someone please advise me on this. The second part of the question is, how long does it take for an article to be listed by google. This article on my site was written today http://www.in2town.co.uk/lifestyle/holidaymakers-ignore-the-importance-of-travel-insurance-according-to-survey Holidaymakers Ignore The Importance of Travel Insurance According To Survey but when i check to see if google has listed the article yet by putting in the whole title, it does not come up, i even added the website name at the end and still it did not come up. This is worrying me a bit as a lot of my articles are news stories which means they are current articles so if google is not picking them up then no one else will be. can anyone let me know what i should be doing so google picks them up quicker please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google is indexing proxy (mirror) site.
We moved the site to a new hosting. Previously the site used Godaddy Windows Hosting with white domain masking. After moving the site we just mirrored the site. We have to use mirrored domain for PPC campaigns because it mirrored site contains true BRAND name and there is better conversion with that domain plus all trade marked keywords are approved for mirrored domain. Robots.txt User-agent: * Host: www.hermitagejewelers.com Disallow: /Bin Disallow: /css www.hermitagejewelers.com is the main domain. Mirror site is www.ermitagejewelers.com (Without the "H" at the beginning) Most of the keywords are now picked up by mirror site. I have not noticed any major changes in ranking except that it ranks for mirror site. We updated the sitemap. Website is designed very poorly (not by us). Also, we submitted the change address request for ermitagejewelers to hermitagejewelers in webmasters. Please let me know any advice to fix that problem. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | MaxRuso1