Best practice to prevent pages from being indexed?
-
Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?
-
Isn't the main question: Why do you have duplicate pages, are these essentials - the easiest option would be to remove them. But in terms of whats the best option, here is a great article from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
I would read that and decide based on your websites and situation the option best suits you.
In my opinion I would suggest:
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
-
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
Removing massive number of no index follow page that are not crawled
Hi, We have stackable filters on some of our pages (ie: ?filter1=a&filter2=b&etc.). Those stacked filters pages are "noindex, follow". They were created in order to facilitate the indexation of the item listed in them. After analysing the logs we know that the search engines do not crawl those stacked filter pages. Does blocking those pages (by loading their link in AJAX for example) would help our crawl rate or not? In order words does removing links that are already not crawled help the crawl rate of the rest of our pages? My assumption here is that SE see those links but discard them because those pages are too deep in our architecture and by removing them we would help SE focus on the rest of our page. We don't want to waste our efforts removing those links if there will be no impact. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitics0 -
Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Glossary index and individual pages create duplicate content. How much might this hurt me?
I've got a glossary on my site with an index page for each letter of the alphabet that has a definition. So the M section lists every definition (the whole definition). But each definition also has its own individual page (and we link to those pages internally so the user doesn't have to hunt down the entire M page). So I definitely have duplicate content ... 112 instances (112 terms). Maybe it's not so bad because each definition is just a short paragraph(?) How much does this hurt my potential ranking for each definition? How much does it hurt my site overall? Am I better off making the individual pages no-index? or canonicalizing them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeadSEOlogist0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Old pages still in index
Hi Guys, I've been working on a E-commerce site for a while now. Let me sum it up : February new site is launched Due to lack of resources we started 301's of old url's in March Added rel=canonical end of May because of huge index numbers (developers forgot!!) Added noindex and robots.txt on at least 1000 urls. Index numbers went down from 105.000 tot 55.000 for now, see screenshot (actual number in sitemap is 13.000) Now when i do site:domain.com there are still old url's in the index while there is a 301 on the url since March! I know this can take a while but I wonder how I can speed this up or am doing something wrong. Hope anyone can help because I simply don't know how the old url's can still be in the index. 4cArHPH.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn70 -
My indexed pages count is shrinking in webmaster tools. Is this normal ?
I noticed that our total # of indexed pages dropped recently by a substantial amount (see chart below) Is this normal? http://imgur.com/4GWzkph Also, 3 weeks after this started dropping, we got a message on increased # of crawl errors and found that a site update was causing 300+ new 404s. could this be related ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Is This 301 Use Best Practice??
I know its effective practice cuz we're getting our arse kicked. I'm curious if its best practice (white, gray or black hat). I'm checking a competitors link profile on its landing page that is hitting the top of page 1 for several keywords. This competitor (national chain) has a strong domain authority (69). The particular landing page I'm checking in OSE has two 301 redirects from its own site among some other directory links to the page. The page shows 15 external links and half of them are very strong including it's own 301's. Aren't they essentially sending their own juice to the landing page to bolster page/domain authority to rank higher in the SERPS for those keywords? Is this a common practice using the 301's to a landing page? Is it white, gray or black hat? They are appearing suddenly appearing on the first page for several category keywords, so we're doing some snooping. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0