De-indexing thin content & Panda--any advantage to immediate de-indexing?
-
We added the nonidex, follow tag to our site about a week ago on several hundred URLs, and they are still in Google's index. I know de-indexing takes time, but I am wondering if having those URLs in the index will continue to "pandalize" the site. Would it be better to use the URL removal request? Or, should we just wait for the noindex tags to remove the URLs from the index?
-
Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index.
Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective
-
Hey
I don't think it would make a great deal of difference as you are going to need to wait for a full crawl of your site anyhow before you see any benefits.
Out of interest, how are you identifying the low quality pages? One way to have a go at this is to use your analytics and identify all pages with a 100% bounce rate and noindex all of them. If there are lots (sounds like there are) you can do them in chunks and see what happens.
Don't get rid of pages that are doing good search traffic or have a low bounce rate UNLESS you know they are really poor pages as sooner or later, they will be picked up.
Ultimately, it sounds like a big site so you are going to have to be patient here and make incremental changes based on analytical and crawl data until you get the results you are looking for.
I have pulled a site back from the depths, a rather unfairly punished site in my opinion that just got it's content copied by several other sites but the same rules applied. We updated pages, removed blocks of template content to their own pages and just kept on watching and like magic, it came back stronger than before a week or so after we made all the changes.
Hope this helps!
Marcus -
You want to be a bit more patient. Depending on how popular and deep these pages are within your site, I would expect it to take several weeks to see most of them disappear. There is a good chance if you check you will find a percentage of those pages are disappearing each day.
The de-index tool is to remove content which you consider harmful to your business. Of course, any damage to your SEO rankings could be considered harmful, but that is clearly not what Google means. If you use the tool, they clearly explain it is for pages which need to "urgently" need to be removed due to legal reasons, copyright issues, etc.
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
-
Indexing Issue
Hi, We have moved one of our domain https://www.mycity4kids.com/ in angular js and after that, i observed the major drop in the number of indexed pages. I crosschecked the coding and other important parameters but didn't find any major issue. What could be the reason behind the drop?
Technical SEO | | ResultFirst0 -
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Quickest way to remove content from Google index?
We had some content on our own website indexed by Google and the content was changed later. But that content is still showing up in Google results. Of course because it was indexed. Its very important for us that content should not show up in Google. So how to remove that content quickly from Google Index? I know normally when it crawl again it will show new content. Google url removal tool or Google url fetch ? or anything else?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Subdomains & CDNs
I've set up a CDN to speed up my domain. I've set up a CNAME to map the subdomain cdn.example.com to the URL where the CDN hosts my static content (images, CSS and JS files, and PDFs). www.example.com and cdn.example.com are now two different IP addresses. Internal links to my PDF files (white papers and articles) used to be www.example.com/downloads but now they are cdn.example.com/downloads The same PDF files can be accessed at both the www and the cdn. subdomain. Thus, external links to the www version will continue to work. Question 1: Should I set up 301 redirects in .htaccess such as: Redirect permanent /downloads/filename.pdf http://cdn.example.com/downloads/filename.pdf Question 2: Do I need to do anything else in my .htaccess file (or anywhere else) to ensure that any SEO benefit provided by the PDF files remains associated with my domain? Question 3: Am I better off keeping my PDF files on the www side and off of the CDN? Thanks, Akira
Technical SEO | | ahirai0 -
301 Redirect Question for trailing slash & index.php
1. Can you show me how to do a redirect for forhttp://www.exercisebiology.com to http://www.exercisebiology.com/ I want to add the trailing slash. 2. Also how to redirect from http://www.exercisebiology.com/in... to http://www.exercisebiology.com/. When I tried to redirect the index.php last time, I couldn't login to the forums. Everytime when someone tries to login to my forums, it takes them the to the home page. I did it through the hostgator CP. I am thinking someone could help me here. Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | anoopbal0 -
404-like content
A site that I look after is having lots of soft 404 responses for pages that are not 404 at all but unique content pages. the following page is an example: http://www.professionalindemnitynow.com/medical-malpractice-insurance-clinics This page returns a 200 response code, has unique content, but is not getting indexed. Any ideas? To add further information that may well impact your answer, let me explain how this "classic ASP" website performs the SEO Friendly url mapping: All pages within the custom CMS have a unique ID which are referenced with an ?intID=xx parameter. The custom 404.asp file receives a request, looks up the ID to find matching content in the CMS, and then server.transfers the visitor to the correct page. Like I said, the response codes are setup correctly, as far as Firebug can tell me. any thoughts would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | eseyo20 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0