Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
-
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept?
If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag?
If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
-
Sometimes you need to leave the crawl path open to Googlebot so they can get around the site. A specific example that may be relevant to you is in pagination. If you have 100 products and are only showing 10 on the first page Google will not be able to reach the other 90 product pages as easily if you block paginated pages in the robots.txt. Better options in such a case might be a robots noindex,follow meta tag, rel next/prev tags, or a "view all" canonical page.
If these pages aren't important to the crawlability of the site, such as internal search results, you could block them in the robots.txt file with little or no issues, and it would help to get them out of the index. If they aren't useful for spiders or users, or anything else, then yes you can and should probably let them 404, rather than blocking.
Yes, I do like to leave the blocked or removed URLs in the sitemap for just a little while to ensure Googlebog revisits them and sees the noindex tag, 404 error code, 301 redirect, or whatever it is they need to see in order to update their index. They'll get there on their own eventually, but I find it faster to send them to the pages myself. Once Googlebot visits these URls and updates their index you should remove them from your sitemaps.
-
If you want to noindex any of your pages, there is no way that Google or any other search engines will think something is fishy. Its up to the webmaster to decide what and what not to get indexed from his website. If you implement page level noindex, the link juice will still flow to the page but if you also have nofollow along with noindex, the link juice will flow to the page but will be contained on the page itself and will not be passed on the links that flow out of that page.
I conclude by saying, there is nothing wrong in making the pages non-indexable.
Here is an interesting discussion related to this on Moz:
http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice
Hope it helps.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Devanur,
What I am asking is if the robots/google will view it as a negative thing for noindexing pages and still trying to pass the link juice, even though the pages aren't even viewable to the front end user.
-
If you wish not to show these pages even to the front end user, you can just block them using the page level robots meta tag so that these pages will never be indexed by the search engines as well.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Yes, but what if these pages aren't even viewable to the front end user?
-
Hi there, it is a very good idea to block any and all the pages that do not provide any useful content to the visitors and especially when they are very thin content wise. So the idea is to keep away low quality content that does no good to the visitor, from the Internet. Search engines would love every webmaster doing so.
However, sometimes, no matter how thin the content is on some pages, they still provide good information to the visitors and serve the purpose of the visit. In this case, you can provide contextual links to those pages and add the nofollow attribute to the link. Of course you should ideally be implementing the page level blocking using the robots meta tag on those pages. I do not think you should return a 404 on these pages as there is no need to do so. When a page level blocking is implemented, Google will not index the blocked content even if it finds a third party reference to it from elsewhere on the Internet.
If you have implemented the page level noindex using the robots meta tag, there is no need to go for a sitemap with these URLs. With noindex in place, as I mentioned above, Google will not index the content even if it discovers the page using a reference from anywhere on the Internet.
Hope it helps my friend.Best,Devanur Rafi
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
-
I show different versions of the same page to the crawlers and users, but do not want to do anymore
Hello, While Google could not read JavaScript, I created two versions of the same page, one of them is for human and another is for Google. Now I do not want to serve different content to the search engine. But, I am worry if I will lose my traffic value. What is the best way to succeed it without loss? Can you help me?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kipra0 -
Are links on sites that require PAD files good or bad for SEO?
I want to list our product on a number of sites that require PAD files such as Software Informer and Softpedia. Is this a good idea from an SEO perspective to have links on these pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnapComms0 -
Having a Size Chart and Personalization Descriptions on each page - Duplicate Content?
Hi everyone, I am coding a Shopify Store theme currently and we want to show customers the size comparisons and personalization options for each product. It will be a great UX addition since it is the number one & two things asked via customer support. But my only concern is that Google might flag it as duplicate content since it will be visible on each product page. What are your thoughts and/or suggestions? Thank you so much in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MadeByBrew0 -
Thin Content Pages: Adding more content really help?
Hello all, So I have a website that was hit hard by Panda back in 2012 November, and ever since the traffic continues to die week by week. The site doesnt have any major moz errors (aside from too many on page links). The site has about 2,700 articles and the text to html ratio is about 14.38%, so clearly we need more text in our articles and we need to relax a little on the number of pictures/links we add. We have increased the text to html ratio for all of our new articles that we put out, but I was wondering how beneficial it is to go back and add more text content to the 2,700 old articles that we have just sitting. Would this really be worth the time and investment? Could this help the drastic decline in traffic and maybe even help it grow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Victim of Negative SEO - Can I Redirect the Attacked Page to an External Site?
My site has been a victim of Negative SEO. During the course of 3 weeks, I have received over 3000 new backlinks from 200 referring domains (based on Ahref report). All links are pointing to just 1 page (all other pages within the site are unaffected). I have already disavowed as many links as possible from Ahref report, but is that all I can do? What if I continue to receive bad backlinks? I'm thinking of permanently redirecting the affected page to an external website (a dummy site), and hope that all the juice from the bad backlinks will be transferred to that site. Do you think this would be a good practice? I don't care much about keeping the affected page on my site, but I want to make sure the bad backlinks don't affect the entire site. The bad backlinks started to come in around 3 weeks ago and the rankings haven't been affected yet. The backlinks are targeting one single keyword and are mostly comment backlinks and trackbacks. Would appreciate any suggestions 🙂 Howard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
XML feeds in regards to Duplicate Content
Hi everyone I hope you can help. I run a property portal in Spain and am looking for an answer to an issue we are having. We are in the process of uploading an XML feed to our site which contains 10,000+ properties relating to our niche. Although this is great for our customers I am aware this content is going to be duplicated from other sites as our clients advertise over a range of portals. My question is, are there any measures I can take to safeguard our site from penalisation from Google? Manually writing up 10,000 + descriptions for properties is out of the question sadly. I really hope somebody can help Thanks Steve
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | buysellrentspain0 -
How to know if a link in a directory will be good for my site?
Hi! Some time ago, a friend of my added our site to a directory. I did not notice it until today, when in the search results for my domain name, the directory came in the first page, in the four position. My friend wrote a nice article, describing our bussiness, and the page has a doFollow link. Looking at the metrics of that directory, I found the following: Domain Authority: 70; main page authority: 76; linking domain roots: 1383; total links: 94663 (several anchor texts); facebook shares: 26; facebook likes: 14; tweets: 20; Google +1: 15. The directory accept a free article about a company, does not review it before it is published, but look for duplicated articles representing spam; so one company can only have one listing (in theory). Is there any formula to know if a directory is safe to publish a doFollow link? If they don't review the link I would say is not a good signal, but is there any other factors to take into account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | te_c0 -
Links via scraped / cloned content
Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names). To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed. Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0