Category Pages For Distributing Authority But Not Creating Duplicate Content
-
I read this interesting moz guide: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt, which I think answered my question but I just want to make sure.
I take it to mean that if I have category pages with nothing but duplicate content (lists of other pages (h1 title/on-page description and links to same) and that I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct?
Again, don't want the category pages to index or have a duplicate content issue, but do want the category pages to be crawled enough to distribute their link authority to individual pages.
Given the scope of the site (thousands of pages and hundreds of categories), I just want to make sure I have that right. Up until my recent efforts on this, some of the category pages have been robot.txt'd out and still in the site map, while others (with different url structure) have been in the sitemap, but not robots.txt'd out.
Thanks! Best.. Mike
-
Thanks, Jane! I really appreciate it.
If the now noindexed category pages have already been indexed, do you think I should request removal from the index as well?
Best... Mike
-
"I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct?"
This will achieve the goal, yes. You would ideally include noindex, follow (as opposed to nofollow) in the meta tag of the page you want to exclude. This means that Google crawls the page in full and allows PageRank to flow from that page to the pages it links to, but doesn't include any of the page's content or its URL in the index.
If you exclude the page via robots.txt, Google never crawls the page at all. You sometimes see URLs whose pages have been excluded via robots.txt showing up in Google's index, because robots.txt doesn't say "don't index this URL"; it simply says "don't crawl it." That's also why excluding a page in robots.txt and putting a noindex meta tag on the page would be redundant - Google would never see the noindex tag because it would never crawl the page.
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
-
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
301 from old site to new one , Should I point to home page or sub category page ?
Hey Seo Experts, I have a small website ranking for few terms like cabinets sale, buy etc . However what i have now decided is to launch a New website with more different products like living room furniture, wardrobes etc . Out of all these categories on new website Cabinets is one of the SubCategory . Now I do not want to have 2 websites . So wanted to 301 from small cabinets website to newly created website. Some of the doubts I have at the moment is ? 1 Should I REDIRECT 301 to sub category (i,e cabinets) which is purely related to Cabinets or Do a Redirect to HOME PAGE . As I also need more Authority to home page as well , as this is relatively new website ? 2 Second question related to this. If you have multiple sub domains does it divide the total authority & TF.Or it is just Ok to have multiple Sub domains if needed ? Any advice appreciated !! Thanks .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Is Sitemap Issue Causing Duplicate Content & Unindexed Pages on Google?
On July 10th my site was migrated from Drupal to Google. The site contains approximately 400 pages. 301 permanent redirects were used. The site contains maybe 50 pages of new content. Many of the new pages have not been indexed and many pages show as duplicate content. Is it possible that there is a site map issue that is causing this problem? My developer believes the map is formatted correctly, but I am not convinced. The sitemap address is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/page-sitemap.xml [^] I am completely non technical so if anyone could take a brief look I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan | |0 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
Duplicate Content/ Indexing Question
I have a real estate Wordpress site that uses an IDX provider to add real estate listings to my site. A new page is created as a new property comes to market and then the page is deleted when the property is sold. I like the functionality of the service but it creates a significant amount of 404's and I'm also concerned about duplicate content because anyone else using the same service here in Las Vegas will have 1000's of the exact same property pages that I do. Any thoughts on this and is there a way that I can have the search engines only index the core 20 pages of my site and ignore future property pages? Your advice is greatly appreciated. See link for example http://www.mylvcondosales.com/mandarin-las-vegas/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0 -
Duplicate page content and duplicate pate title
Hi, i am running a global concept that operates with one webpage that has lot of content, the content is also available on different domains, but with in the same concept. I think i am getting bad ranking due to duplicate content, since some of the content is mirrored from the main page to the other "support pages" and they are almost 200 in total. Can i do some changes to work around this or am i just screwed 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartmedia0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0