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
-
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
Index.php duplicate content
Hi, new here. Im looking for some help with htaccess file. index.php is showing duplicate content errors with: mysite.com/index.php mysite.com/ mysite.com ive managed to use the following code to remove the www part of the url: IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Technical SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] but how can i redirect the mysite.com/index.php and mysite.com/ to mysite.com. Please help0 -
Duplicate Content
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress). so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way. thanks
Technical SEO | | vansy0 -
Duplicate content problem from an index.php file
Hi One of my sites is flagging a duplicate content problem which is affecting the search rankings. The duplicate problem is caused by http://www.mydomain.com/index.php which has a page rank of 26 How can I sort the duplicate content problem, as the main page should just be http://www.mydomain.com which has a page rank of 42 and is the stronger page with stronger links etc Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Homepage/Root domain de-indexed by Google
This morning I discovered that the homepage/root domain of our company site, http://www.collegeplus.org/, has been de-indexed by Google and Bing. Out IT dept. is claiming it's our fault because we changed the meta title on our homepage. But they will not give me access to GWT to see if there's any issues. I believe the issue lies within our robots.txt file - http://www.collegeplus.org/robots.txt I also don't believe we're suffering a penalty because all of our tier 2 pages are still indexed when any type of branded search is performed. We don't do things that can get a site de-indexed like this. Any ideas on what the issue may be? Or at least something to convince our IT dept. that simply changing a meta title won't get your homepage totally de-indexed? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | explorionary0 -
Duplicate content, how to solve?
I have about 400 errors about duplicate content on my seomoz dashboard. However I have no idea how to solve this, I have 2 main scenarios of duplication in my site: Scenario 1: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?name=64MB+SDRAM+DIMM+MEMORY+MODULE&sku=&price%5Bfrom%5D=&price%5Bto%5D=&category= 3 products with the same title, but different product models, as you can note is has the same price as well. Some printers use a different memory product module. So I just cant delete 2 products. Scenario 2: toners http://www.theprinterdepo.com/brother-high-capacity-black-toner-cartridge-compatible-73 http://www.theprinterdepo.com/brother-high-capacity-black-toner-cartridge-compatible-75 In this scenario, products have a different title but the same price. Again, in this scenario the 2 products are different. Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Canonical pagination content
Hello We have a large ecommerce site, as you are aware that ecommerce sites has canonical issues, I have read various sources on how best to practice canonical on ecommerce site but I am not sure yet.. My concert is pagination where I am on category product listing page.. the pagination will have all different product not same however the meta data will be same so should I make let's say page 2 or 3 to main category page or keep them as is to index those pages? Another issue is using filters, where I am on any page and I filter by price or manufacturer basically the page will be same so here It seems issue of duplicate content, so should I canonical to category page only for those result types? So basically If I let google crawl my pagination content and I only canonical those coming with filter search result that would be best practice? and would google webmaster parameter handling case would be helpful in this scenario ? Please feel free to ask in case you have any queries regards
Technical SEO | | CNMOnline28
Carl0