Should I noindex, nofollow a lot of child pages?
-
Some category pages on my website have A LOT of product pages in them. Many of these pages do not receive any sort of organic traffic. Is there a reason for Google to be crawling these pages? Should I noindex, nofollow these pages to make Google's life a little easier? Could I possibly see some benefits from this or should I leave it the way it is?
-
it all comes down to the amount of content on the pages. hyper targeted pages like sizes usually don't get enough editor attention or have enough unique content written about them to make them valuable and in that case a main page listing the sizes will suffice because they will rank for those sizes if the content is on the page because it is so extremely long tail...and protects you from panda. I just went through this exercise with a pool company who had several brands and multiple sizes and we opted to not get so granular.
-
Having pages that no one goes to won't negatively affect the rankings of the rest of your site.
In your case if you're really concerned about those obscure pages and they're thin or duplicate content, you could choose one really popular product in each category (such as "6x6x4 red foil gift box") and add canonical tags on the other similar products in that category (i.e. all the other red box pages) pointing to the popular one.
-
I would say leave them in there as you want Google to see everything on your site that might be relevant to the user.
I think you are referring to what some call Crawl Optimization or Crawl Budget (great article here http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization) and yes there is something to making sure that you do not waste Google's time in crawling pages that do not matter.
I would still think that product pages are worth Google's time if you have good content and also, these are the things that you sell. Seems that Google would not only want to see your category pages, but what items are in a category. One thing to note, all of those "red box" product pages all link up to the "red box" category page. That is part of what makes the "red box" category authoritative within your site as you are telling Google this with your internal link structure. You may find that if you noindex your product pages, your category pages may go down.
The use of the noindex/nofollow to help with Crawl Optimization is really more for pages like search pages, or pages that can be resorted 100 different ways with 100 different URLs. Those are all duplicates and waste Googles time. Your product pages are really different animals and so my vote would be to keep them in the crawl.
-
Thanks for the response. The thing is these small product pages are too obscure for anyone to find. Many are differentiated only by product size.
For example:
If someone types in "red boxes" into google, we will rank for “red boxes”. On this category page, we have 24 different red box products such as "6x6x4 Red Foil Gift Box" and "5 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 Red Glossy Box." Sure, if somebody searched for a "6x6x4 Red Foil Gift Box," our page would show. But nobody is going to search that. There are ways to eliminate some of these extra pages, but it would be less user friendly for a customer clicking through the site.
My question is, if Google sees that these pages consistently get no organic traffic, even if they might rank for some obscure keyword, can keeping these pages have a negative effect on my rankings?
-
I would think you would want Google to find your product pages and then get you traffic for them. I dont think the solution is to use noindex as that would take them out of the index for sure.
I am betting that either due to your site archtecture or how you have your sitemap setup or even possibly that you have thin content on all the product pages are more of the issue.
If you don't want to work on any of those things, sure you can noindex all of your product pages, but then it just seems like you are giving up and limiting your long term outlook for ranking pages in Google.
The only reason I would use the noindex in a case like yours would be to keep duplicate product or category pages out of the index. Additionally, I would use that also to keep Google out of any of your search result pages, shopping cart etc. Those are the pages that are wasting Google's time. That brings up another point, are you having Google crawl a bunch of duplicate content on your site and that is why it never gets to the "good" content pages?
Good luck!
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
-
Keyword ranking for different page than the page optimized
I have optimized "equipment trailer for rent" on this page: http://www.bigtrailerrentals.com/flatbed-trailer-rentals/equipment-deckover. I'm wondering if anyone can tell me why Google has chosen to rank the keyword phrase for this page: http://www.bigtrailerrentals.com/flatbed-trailer-rentals/equipment-24 This is just one example. It has happened on several of my pages / keywords.
On-Page Optimization | | BigTrailerRentals0 -
What is the best meta description for Category Pages, Tag Pages and Main Article?
Hi, I want to index all my categories and tags. But I fear about duplicating the meta description. for example: I have a tag name "Learn Stock Market", a category name "Learning", and a main article "What is Stock Market". What is your suggestion for meta description of these three pages that looks great for seo google?
On-Page Optimization | | mbmozmb0 -
Which is better? One dynamically optimised page, or lots of optimised pages?
For the purpose of simplicity, we have 5 main categories in the site - let's call them A, B, C, D, E. Each of these categories have sub-category pages e.g. A1, A2, A3. The main area of the site consists of these category and sub-category pages. But as each product comes in different woods, it's useful for customers to see all the product that come in a particular wood, e.g. walnut. So many years ago we created 'woods' pages. These pages replicate the categories & sub-categories but only show what is available in that particular wood. And of course - they're optimised much better for that wood. All well and good, until recently, these specialist page seem to have dropped through the floor in Google. Could be temporary, I don't know, and it's only a fortnight - but I'm worried. Now, because the site is dynamic, we could do things differently. We could still have landing pages for each wood, but of spinning off to their own optimised specific wood sub-category page, they could instead link to the primary sub-category page with a ?search filter in the URL. This way, the customer is still getting to see what they want. Which is better? One page per sub-category? Dynamically filtered by search. Or lots of specific sub-category pages? I guess at the heart of this question is? Does having lots of specific sub-category pages lead to a large overlap of duplicate content, and is it better keeping that authority juice on a single page? Even if the URL changes (with a query in the URL) to enable whatever filtering we need to do.
On-Page Optimization | | pulcinella2uk0 -
Category Page Content
Hey Mozzers, I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile" Above The Fold
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and products My criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword. I cleaned this up to the following structure Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products The new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address. 1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories Any other critisms or comment welcome0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hi, I did a SEOmoz campaign and got results today, One of the results is Too "Many On-Page Links" when i am drilling down, i see that that's include inside links. for example, i sale food, i have my main department window - inside i have 30 products - each product is linked to a detailed page about the product. so automatically i have 30 links - not including all the others in this page, and i easily get over 100 and even sometimes 200 is this a big issue? does it damages my SEO? If yes, is there a way to write the HTML in a way that internal links like that wont be counted? Thank you SEOWiseUs
On-Page Optimization | | iivgi0 -
Page Title - What is better?
Hi SEO Heads, I have another question if someone would be so kind in answering What page title of the 2 below is better for SEO (i) Chocolate Cake|Chocolate Cake Recipe|Xmas Cake or (ii) Chocolate Cake | Chocolate Cake Recipe | Xmas Cake As you can see (ii) Page Title has a space before and after the | (vertical bar) I know the second page title looks better to human eyes but on some pages I had to forego the space so i could fit my keywords in the page title. is this a good idea? Can anyone help me? Cheers Aidan
On-Page Optimization | | aidanlawlor0 -
Which redirect to use when redirecting to https page from http page
I have one form under https which is redirected from the regular http page. this site was not made by me and I am trying to understand if the way it was redirected using 302 redirect is a problem Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Spammy keywords on a page
My client's website has a box of text on each page that is spammy and horrible to read and stuffed with keywords. The text boxes are there only for search engines as they mean nothing to humans. I say remove them as it must be doing more harm than good. However, my client is scared to remove them as the text has been there on each page for ten years and he is worried about a drop in visitor numbers if they are removed. Is he right to be worried?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0