Can't get auto-generated content de-indexed

[rja214]

Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me!

Customgia.com, a costume jewelry e-commerce site, has two types of product pages - public pages that are internally linked and private pages that are only accessible by accessing the URL directly.  Every item on Customgia is created online using an online design tool.  Users can register for a free account and save the designs they create, even if they don't purchase them.  Prior to saving their design, the user is required to enter a product name and choose "public" or "private" for that design.  The page title and product description are auto-generated.

Since launching in October '11, the number of products grew and grew as more users designed jewelry items.  Most users chose to show their designs publicly, so the number of products in the store swelled to nearly 3000.  I realized many of these designs were similar to each and occasionally exact duplicates.  So over the past 8 months, I've made 2300 of these design "private" - and no longer accessible unless the designer logs into their account (these pages can also be linked to directly).

When I realized that Google had indexed nearly all 3000 products, I entered URL removal requests on Webmaster Tools for the designs that I had changed to "private".  I did this starting about 4 months ago.  At the time, I did not have NOINDEX meta tags on these product pages (obviously a mistake) so it appears that most of these product pages were never removed from the index.  Or if they were removed, they were added back in after the 90 days were up.

Of the 716 products currently showing (the ones I want Google to know about), 466 have unique, informative descriptions written by humans.  The remaining 250 have auto-generated descriptions that read coherently but are somewhat similar to one another.  I don't think these 250 descriptions are the big problem right now but these product pages can be hidden if necessary.

I think the big problem is the 2000 product pages that are still in the Google index but shouldn't be.  The following Google query tells me roughly how many product pages are in the index:  site:Customgia.com inurl:shop-for

Ideally, it should return just over 716 results but instead it's returning 2650 results.  Most of these 1900 product pages have bad product names and highly similar, auto-generated descriptions and page titles.  I wish Google never crawled them.

Last week, NOINDEX tags were added to all 1900 "private" designs so currently the only product pages that should be indexed are the 716 showing on the site.  Unfortunately, over the past ten days the number of product pages in the Google index hasn't changed.

One solution I initially thought might work is to re-enter the removal requests because now, with the NOINDEX tags, these pages should be removed permanently.   But I can't determine which product pages need to be removed because Google doesn't let me see that deep into the search results.  If I look at the removal request history it says "Expired" or "Removed" but these labels don't seem to correspond in any way to whether or not that page is currently indexed.  Additionally, Google is unlikely to crawl these "private" pages because they are orphaned and no longer linked to any public pages of the site (and no external links either).

Currently, Customgia.com averages 25 organic visits per month (branded and non-branded) and close to zero sales.  Does anyone think de-indexing the entire site would be appropriate here?  Start with a clean slate and then let Google re-crawl and index only the public pages - would that be easier than battling with Webmaster tools for months on end?

Back in August, I posted a similar problem that was solved using NOINDEX tags (de-indexing a different set of pages on Customgia): http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-site-have-a-duplicate-content-issue#reply_176813

Thanks for reading through all this!

[Dr-Pete]

I don't think there's any harm in submitting a new/full list, even if it duplicates past lists. The URLs haven't been removed, and you did fix the tags. This isn't like disavowing links - it's more of a technical issue. Worst case, it doesn't work, from what I've seen.

[rja214]

Thanks for helping me with this.

You are correct that all the product pages are in the same folder regardless of whether they are public or private so unfortunately, removing an entire folder isn't an option at this point.

When I go to Webmaster tools and view past removal requests, each one shows as either "Expired" or "Removed".  WMT only allows me to resubmit the removal request if the label is "Expired".  Going back past 90 days, many are still labeled "removed" but the further back I go, more and more say "Expired".  There are too many requests to try to determine whether or not each page is indexed - so I think our best bet is to re-submit every expired private product page removal request and then monitor removal.  Does this make sense?

Back in August, a Moz crawl showed tons of duplicates for the designer pages (the pages where the user actually designs the jewelry).  Using NOINDEX tags and removal requests (credit to Dr. Pete and Everett Sizemore) the number of designer pages in the index dropped from 5K to exactly 8 - so it worked.

Our XML sitemap is dynamic and doesn't list private product pages.

[Dr-Pete]

It honestly sounds like you're on the right track - you do need to explicitly mark those (and META NOINDEX should be fine). Could you just request removal for all private pages? Worst case, Google removes some that aren't in the index, or attempts to. Since the public/private setting can be changed, you can't really put the private pages all in one folder (real or virtual) - that would make life easier, long-term, but probably isn't useful/appropriate for your case.

I'd also recommend having a clean XML sitemap with just the public entries (updated dynamically). That won't deindex the other pages, but it's one more cue Google can use. You want all of the signals you're sending to be consistent.

I agree with Doug, though - this is really tricky, because ideally you would want people to share these pages, and if you NOINDEX then you're losing out on that. My gut feeling is that, until your site is stronger, you probably can't support 3K near duplicates (and counting). If you want to get sophisticated, though, you could dynamically NOINDEX and only noindex posts that have very little content or our obvious dupes. As people fill out or share a product, you could remove the NOINDEX.

[rja214]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the quick response.  I will do my best to answer each of your points.

In Webmaster Tools, under Index Status, it shows 1781 pages indexed, with a high of 6515 on June 2, 2013.  Not sure that helps to clarify anything but it's another piece of Google data to consider.

We continually monitor WMT and Analytics.  I'm addressing this issue specifically because search impressions on our product pages average less than 5 impressions/day despite continuous improvements over the last 12 months - keyword research, better page titles/product names and longer, more informative descriptions.  These 500 or so product pages are vastly better today than then were 12 months ago - but impressions have not improved at all.

Every design, public or private, has social/sharing buttons.  As I mentioned above, these designs can all be linked to directly from any external website.

I think the category pages are sufficient.  There is some fine-tuning that could be done in terms of how products are organized within categories but overall it's pretty solid and probably not an issue.

Our initial strategy was to attract long-tail traffic with user-generated content but the problem is most users gave their products personal, irrelevant (and possibly spammy) product names.  There were other problems with the user generated designs as well - like one user who designed 15 earrings that looked exactly the same except for one bead which she changed to a different color for each design.  Anyway,  we left all these designs public for over 12 months - as more and more designs were added to the site, organic search traffic actually fell.

[ciznerguy]

I agree with Doug.

create better category pages - make sure each product page is under a category.

the user generated products are great and should be indexed.

[DougRoberts]

Hey Richard,

First, note that the estimated number of pages displayed by that is an estimate which gets refined the deeper you go into the search results. On page one, they tend to be wildly inaccurate.

If you go all the way to the end (page 13) and then repeat the process with ommitted results included you still get to page 13, and a total of 123 pages. (Somewhat better than the 2k+ results.)

This is less than the 716 pages you mention so maybe you've got he opposite problem? What do you see if you check your google analytics and webmaster tools? Which pages are getting organic traffic from google? Which pages are showing in the search results (Webmaster Tools, Impressions)

What are the pages you want to appear in search and what are the keywords you're targeting?

My first thought is - if you're allowing people to design your own jewellery - are you also allowing them to easily share their creations on social, etc? Have you got embed codes so that they can put their designs on their blog etc? If you're not then I think you're missing a trick.

All of these individual items, designed by users, will (should) all be linking back to the specific category pages (or other landning page) and increasing the authority of that page. Make sure your category/landing pages have good unique content that communicates both the value proposition and the products you've got available.

If you don't have these category pages, then it might be worth looking at your site architecture/hierarchy and think about creating them.

Your individual product pages might get long-tail traffic (and having lots of different variations, described in real-people's own words might actually work to your advantage here), your category pages should be the ones targeting head terms.

I notice you've no-indexed and no-followed the product pages in question. This means that if these pages are shared, then any inbound authority/link equity/link-juice/ is just being discarded. Are you sure you want to do that?

I don't think you need to worry too much about google's index at this point and I certainly wouldn't consider deindexing the whole site.