Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Noindex user profile
-
I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions:
- What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm.
- How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive?
- When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed
- Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity)
- (unique) Profile picture
- (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks or user's own site.
- Embedded Google Map
Thanks!
-
The one thing I would add to your list of criteria, if you choose to go that route, is to look at Google Analytics landing pages and make sure the individual profiles don't any inbound search traffic.
-
The gain would be that you don't index a bunch of URLs on your site that contain essentially similar/thin content. I wouldn't necessarily count those that do bring in long tail traffic as ones you'd want to noindex. Things will return to normal once you remove the noindex, but unless you have decent links pointing to those profiles, it may take up to numerous months to for them to be recrawled. I'd weigh most heavily links (followed or no followed) to the profiles from decent sites, as well as activity that shows on the profile page. The rest I wouldn't consider in the threshold calculation.
-
1. unless you have a big thin content problem there is no gain
2. completely reversible, just remove and wait
3. you will have to decide, you seem like you are on the right track.
4. Question you should have asked, is there any downside to no-indexing these pages, Answer Yes there is, all links pointing to a no-indexed page will leak all their link juice, noindex is a last resort, I have never used.
if you must noindex a page, do it with a meta no-index,follow tag, note that was "follow", not "no-follow", then your link juice will flow into the page and back out again.
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
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
"Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
Hey there Mozzers, I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow" on these pages. What do you think? Has someone faced this situation before? Will appreciate your input!
Technical SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
Sitemap_index.xml = noindex,follow
I was running a rapport with Sreaming Frog SEO Spider and i saw: (Tab) Directives > NOindex : https://compleetverkleed.nl/sitemap_index.xml/ is set on X-Robots-Tag 1 > noindex,follow Does this mean my sitemap isn't indexed? If anyone has some more tips for our website, feel free to give some suggestions 🙂 (Website is far from complete)
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
How do I add "noindex" or "nofollow" to a link in Wordpress
It's been a while since I've SEOed a Wordpress site. How do I add "nofollow" or "noindex" to specific links? I highlight the anchor text in the text editor, I click the "link" button. I could have sworn that there used to be an option in the dialogue box that pops up.
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Noindex vs. page removal - Panda recovery
I'm wondering whether there is a consensus within the SEO community as to whether noindexing pages vs. actually removing pages is different from Google Pandas perspective?Does noindexing pages have less value when removing poor quality content than physically removing ie. either 301ing or 404ing the page being removed and removing the links to it from the site? I presume that removing pages has a positive impact on the amount of link juice that gets to some of the remaining pages deeper into the site, but I also presume this doesn't have any direct impact on the Panda algorithm? Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, and corrections on my assumptions 🙂
Technical SEO | | agencycentral0 -
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
Technical SEO | | markgreggs0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0