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.
No-index pages with duplicate content?
-
Hello,
I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers.
It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have.
Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages?
Thanks a lot for your help!
-
We recommend to such clients that they apply the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the duplicated pages until they get rewritten. We aim for 20% of all products on the site to be completely unique in content, and indexable. The other 80% can be rewritten gradually over time and released back into the index as they are rewritten.
So to answer you question: Yes, I think your plan is perfectly acceptable, and is what I would do myself if I were in the same situation.
-
Duplicate content is not a penalty, it's a filter. Deindexing will ensure that they never rank, leave them indexed and they have a chance of ranking, worst case scenario is they don't rank well because of it.
-
I think Devanur gives some good advice regarding the gradual improvement of the content, though you're stuck in a bit of a catch-22 with regard to how Google views websites: You want to be able to sell lots of products, but don't have the resources for your company present them in a unique or engaging fashion. This is something that Google wants webmasters to do, but the reality of your situation paints a completely different picture of what will give your company decent ROI for updating vast amounts of product content.
If there isn't an obvious Panda problem, I wouldn't just noindex lots of pages without some thought and planning first. Before noindexing the pages I would look at what SEO traffic they're getting. noindexing alone seems like a tried and tested method of bypassing potential Panda penalties and although PageRank will still be passed, there's a chance that you are going to remove pages from the index that are driving traffic (even if it's long tail).
In addition to prioritising content production for indexed pages per Devanur's advice, I would also do some keyword analysis and prioritise the production of new content for terms which people are actually searching for before they purchase.
There's a Moz discussion here which might help you: http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-vs-page-removal-panda-recovery.
Regards
George
@methodicalweb
-
Hi, the suggestion was not to get the quality articles written that take an hour to write each but I meant to change the products descriptions that were copied and pasted with little variation so that they don't look like a copy, paste job.
Now, coming to the de-indexing part, let us look at a scenario:
Suppose I built a website to promote Amazon products through Amazon associates program. I populated its pages using Amazon API through a plugin like WProbot or Protozon. In this case, the content will be purely scraped from Amazon and other places. After a while, I realize that my site has not been performing well in the search engines because of the scraped content but haven't seen any penalty levied or manual action taken. As of now, I have about 3000 pages in Google's index. Now I want to tackle the duplicate content issue. This is what I would do to be on a safer side from a possible penalty in future like Panda:
1. First, will make the top pages unique.
2. Add, noindex to the rest of the duplicate content pages.
3. Keep on making the pages unique in phases, removing the noindex tag to the ones that were updated with unique content.
4. Would repeat the above step till I fix all the duplicate content pages on the website.
It greatly depends on the level of content duplication and few other things so, we will be able to suggest better if we can have a look at the website in question. You can send a private message if you want any of us to have a look at it.
-
Hello,
Like I said in my first post, this has already been done. I was asking a specific question.
on another topic, 300 quality pages of content is not possible in the month. We're talking about articles that take at least an hour to write.
That being said, I'll ask my question again: once I have done, let's say, 750 pages of unique content, should I no-index the rest or not. is there something better to do that doesn't involve writing content for 20 000 pages?
Thanks.
-
Very true my friend. If you look at your top pages for last 30 days, there won't be more than 2000 approximately. So you can make the content unique on these over a period of six months or a bit more going at 300 per month. Trust me, this would be an effort well spent.
-
Hello,
I agree with you that it would be the best but like Isaid, writting content for 20 000 pages is not an option. Thanks for your answer!
-
Going off of what Devanur said. Giving your product pages unique content is the way to go. But this can include pictures, sizes, material and etc... I am in the rug business and this is how we pull it off and also how RugsUSA does as well. If you do not however, I would do what Devanur referred to with changing descriptions of your top selling products first.
All the best!
-
Hi,
While its not recommended to have duplicate content on your pages that is found else where, it is also not a good thing to de-index pages from Google. If I were you, I would have tried to beef-up these duplicate pages a little bit with unique content or at least rewritten the existing content so that it becomes unique.
Please go ahead and initiate the task of rewriting the product descriptions in phases starting with the ones that get the most traffic as per your web analytics data. Those were my two cents my friend.
Best regards,
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
-
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Links from non-indexed pages
Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxweb0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1