Noindex large productpages on webshop to counter Panda
-
A Dutch webshop with 10.000 productpages is experiencing lower rankings and indexation. Problems started last october, a little while after the panda and penguin update.
One of the problems diagnosed is the lack of unique content. Many of the productpages lack a description and some are variants of eachother. (color, size, etc). So a solution could be to write unique descriptions and use rel canonical to concentrate color/size variations to one productpage.
There is however no capacity to do this on short notice. So now I'm wondering if the following is effective.
Exclude all productpages via noindex, robots.txt. IN the same way as you can do with search pages. The only pages left for indexation are homepage and 200-300 categorypages. We then write unique content and work on the ranking of the categorypages. When this works the product pages are rewritten and slowly reincluded, category by category.
My worry is the loss of ranking for productpages. ALthoug the ranking is minimal currently. My second worry is the high amount of links on category pages that lead to produtpages that will be excluded rom google. Thirdly, I am wondering if this works at all. using noindex on 10.000 productpages consumes crawl budget and dillutes the internal link structure.
What do you think?
-
I see. There's a pretty thorough discussion on a very similar situation here: http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-use-nofollow-tag-on-product-page-duplicated-content. Everett endorsed Monica's answer with, "... you might consider putting a Robots Noindex,Follow meta tag on the product pages. You'll need to rely on category pages for rankings in that case, which makes sense for a site like this." Monica's long term solution was to also work on getting specific user-generated content on as many product pages as possible. Cheers!
-
@Ryan, thx for your answer. The pagerank flow is indeed one of the things I worry about when deindexing large parts of the site. Especcialy since the category pages will be full of internal links to productpages that are excluded from indexation by robots.txt or robots meta.
The problem I am trying to solve however has nothing to do with pagerank sculpting. I suspect an algorithmic drop due to thin, duplicate and syndicated content. The drop is sitewide. Assuming that the drop is due to panda I suspect the percentage of low quality pages should be optimized. Would outlinking and better DA really be sufficient to counter a suspected Panda problem? Or is it required to make the 10.000 product pages of better quality, I would think the latter. Since there is no budget to do so I wonder if it is possible to drop these low quality pages from the index (but keep them in the website). Would this strenghten the remaining pages to bounce back up, assuming these remaining pages are of good quality offcourse.
Since SEO is not the only factor to be taken into account I'd rather not delete these pages from the website.
-
Matt Cutts speaks to part of what you're thinking about doing here: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ and it's important to note that it's not nearly as effective. The thing I would focus more on is the DA and quality of referrals to your site. Secondly, linking out from pages is actually a positive strength indicator when done in the right way, per Cutts in the same article, "In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites." Perhaps your product pages could be strengthened further by this as well.
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
-
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Bringing a large news site back on line - anything to look out for?
Hi, I'm advising an online news site site that has been completely offline for almost 6 months, and is now looking to start back up again. The site seems to be completely gone from google's cache. This might mean moving to new hosting, but with the same URL. The archive has about 7000 original articles. Most of these are date specific news, although there are some longer investigative pieces that are more timeless. Is there any difference (from an SEO/digital marketing perspective) between putting the whole archive online at once, or gradually republishing the old articles? Is there anything I should be aware of, when restarting a website of this size? Thanks - Chris
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Are nofollow, noindex meta tags healthy for this particular situation?
Hi mozzers, I am conducting an audit for a client and found over 200 instances using meta tags(nofollow, noindex). These were implemented essentially on Blog pages/category pages, tags not blog posts which is a good sign. I believe that tagged URLs aren't something to worry about since these create tons of duplicates. In regards to the category page, i feel that it falls in the same basket as tags but I am not positive about it. Can someone tell me if these are fine to have noindex, nofollow? Also on the website subnav which are related to the category pages mentioned prev, the webmaster have implemented noindex,follow(screenshot below), which seems ok to me? am i right? Thanks 8egLLbo.png?1
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
Similar pages: noindex or rel:canonical or disregard parameters?!
Hey all! We have a hotel booking website that has search results pages per destinations (e.g. hotels in NYC is dayguest.com/nyc). Pages are also generated for destinations depending on various parameters, that can be star rating, amenities, style of the properties, etc. (e.g. dayguest.com/nyc/4stars, dayguest.com/nyc/luggagestorage, dayguest.com/nyc/luxury, etc.). In general, all of these pages are very similar, as for example, there might be 10 hotels in NYC and all of them will offer luggage storage. Pages can be nearly identical. Come the problems of duplicate content and loss of juice by dilution. I was wondering what was the best practice in such a situation: should I just put all pages except the most important ones (e.g. dayguest.com/nyc) as noindex? Or set it as canonical page for all variations? Or in google webmaster tool ask google to disregard the URLs for various parameters? Or do something else altogether?! Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | Philoups0 -
Panda Victim still looking for recovery looking for help
I am an internet retailer hit by Panda and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on feb 2011. I had a slight recovery last september but have since slipped back again. I have scoured the internet for panda recoveries for internet retailers like me but I have not seen any. If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine (wackyplanet.com) -- we are on a yahoo store platform I would aappreciate any info as I am looking for an SEO who has experience with Panda as it relates to sites like mine.
Technical SEO | | bobforesi0 -
After entire site is noindex'd, how long to recover?
A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today. Ugh... We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0 -
Is it Panda?, how to deal with AP etc newswire articles
A site I have lost 30% of its traffic in June then another 10% in July, is it Panda? The site has 10's of thousands of AP or other syndicated articles on it, they are not there for SE benefits, they are categorized and relevant to the people who read them, the site gets half of its traffic from type ins/bookmarks. Should I nofollow the articles or rel="canonical" them? what can help...... Cheers
Technical SEO | | adamzski0