Is it convinient to use No-Index, Follow to my Paginated Pages?

[vivekrathore]

I have a website http://www.naukrigulf.com and it has a lot of Paginated pages on its SERP and most of paginated pages are getting indexed in Google SERP. Is it beneficial to use No-Index, Follow to keep the link equity to main (first page),  although we have already used rel=next and rel=prev. If Answer is "yes" is their any harm by using no-index, follow with rel=next, rel=prev.

[vivekrathore]

Thanks Tom,

Have checked none of the paginated pages are driving traffic so i think No-index, follow will be the best choice.

Regards,

Anirban

[TomVolpe]

Hi there,

If you don’t want these pages to appear in the index then yes, noindex follow would be the best directive to ensure any link juice still flows through them pages into other indexed pages, such as your blog posts found on those pages etc.

The harm of using noindex is when you are actually bringing in organic traffic through those pages, so have a look in analytics before you start noindexing. Take a look at organic traffic where your paged pages are the landing page – you could use a filter for something like page/ or page/[0-9]+ (or however your urls are structured for pagination) to look at all of these pages.

If those pages are bringing in organic traffic, why not optimise your metas and encourage even more users onto those pages? If they aren’t getting any entrances from search, you’re safe to do whichever you prefer - you could noidex,follow them to drop them from the index and keep the PR flowing.

Those pages aren’t harming you so you’re safe to leave them if you’re unsure, but always check entrances from search before you drop ANY page from the index. That way you can be sure you won’t lose any of your traffic.

Hope that helps,

Tom