Will unused/dead pages within my site that is non-linked hurt my seo?
-
For example my website has mysite.com/randomunusedpage.html
No links go into that page from the website but it is published (came with the WP theme). Will that hurt my SEO and should I delete the page or is it harmless?
Thanks
-
Thanks for the help. I guess it was bad practice on my part to have a lot of unused pages on the website but glad it doesn't have much bad effects.
I used site:yoursite and it returned a lot of the unwanted pages (came with the theme). I've removed them now and will return 404 for now until removed.
-
Hi Marvellous,
Patrick provided you with a great answer. Notice he mentions the sitemap as well, if you’re using an automatically generated sitemap (from Yoast for example) these pages will be included and that way they will get indexed. Besides the option that Patrick mentioned you can exclude them from your sitemap with the advanced settings of the Yoast SEO plugin (assuming you’re using it).
If you want to be sure they aren’t indexed, you can use a site:yourwebsite.com command to view your indexed pages. You can add a text from the pages you don’t want to be ranked for ass well to narrow down the results.
Best regards,
Bob
-
Hi there
No it won't hurt your site, but you are able to block access to those pages via robots.txt. If it's not linked to externally, or via your internal links/sitemap, then you should be fine, but the option is there.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Are on-site content carousel bad for SEO?
Hi, I didn't find an answer to my question in the Forum. I attached an example of content carousel, this is what I'm talking about. I understand that Google has no problem anymore with tabbed contents and accordeons (collapsible contents). But now I'm wondering about textual carousels. I'm not talking about an image slider, I'm talking about texts. Is text carousel harder to read for Google than plain text or tabs? Of course, i'm not talking about a carousel using Flash. Let's say the code is proper... Thanks for your help. spfra5
Technical SEO | | Alviau0 -
Site Launching, not SEO Ready
Hi, So, we have a site going up on Monday, that in many ways hasn't been gotten ready for search. The focus has been on functionality and UX rather than search, which is fair enough. As a result, I have a big list of things for the developer to complete after launch (like sorting out duplicate pages and adding titles that aren't "undefined" etc.). So, my question is whether it would be better to noindex the site until all the main things are sorted before essentially presenting search engines with the best version we can, or to have the site be indexed (duplicate pages and all) and sort these issues "live", as it were? Would either method be advisable over the other, or are there any other solutions? I just want to ensure we start ranking as well as possible as quickly as possible and don't know which way to go. Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Can Silos and Exact Anchor Text In Links Hurt a Site Post Penguin?
Just got a client whose site dropped from a PR of 3 to zero. This happened shortly after the Penguin release, June, 2012. Examining the site, I couldn't find any significant duplicate content, and where I did find duplicate content (9%), a closer look revealed that the duplication was totally coincidental (common expressions). Looking deeper, I found no sign of purchased links or linking patterns that would hint at link schemes, no changes to site structure, no change of hosting environment or IP address. I also looked at other factors, too many to mention here, and found no evidence of black hat tactics or techniques. The site is structured in silos, "services", "about" and "blog". All page titles that fall under services are categorized (silo) under "services", all blog entries are categorized under "blogs", and all pages with company related information are categorized under "about". When exploring the site's links in Site Explorer (SE), I noticed that SE is identifying the "silo" section of links (i.e. services, about, blog, etc.) and labeling it as an anchor text. For example, domain.com/(services)/page-title, where the page title prefix (silo), "/services/", is labeled as an anchor text. The same is true for "blog" and "about". BTW, each silo has its own navigational menu appearing specifically for the content type it represents. Overall, though there's plenty of room for improvement, the site is structured logically. My question is, if Site Explorer is picking up the silo (services) and identifying it as an anchor text, is Google doing the same? That would mean that out of the 15 types of service offerings, all 15 links would show as having the same exact anchor text (services). Can this type of site structure (silo) hurt a website post Penguin?
Technical SEO | | UplinkSpyder0 -
Will updating part of my site help a static web page
Hi, what i am trying to find out is, i have a page on my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy and i would like to know, once i have got the page to the way i want it, the page will not change, so i would like to know if i update my site and add pages and articles, will the updates help this page with google rankings, or do i have to keep updating this page if i want it to rank high with google. i have seen pages that have never changed but they continue to rank high with google and i would like to know their secret
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Logo / H1 page structure
Not sure why I did it this way, but I need to know if this is bad for SEO - I suspect it is. Consider this is how the Logo and company name is shown on each page of our site. # UpCounsel, Inc Where the #title tag has a background image showing our company logo, rather than the actual company words. Then the CSS is also displacing the company text in favor of the logo, but also helps with accessbility so the first thing they see on the site is the company name. My question is - I should probably not use an H1 tag for this, right? And then in order to change this around, I should use H1's for the important title of the page. I understand there is some question about whether the page <title>and H1 should be the same, but we don't need to go there right now. ;-)</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Mase0 -
Does it hurt to have a dynamic counter in your page title?
Currently we work with page titles which display the number of products we have as a counter. This number is highly volatile and can change every day, so that our page title changes all the time. We did this to improve user experience, meet expectations and improve click through rates. Question is whether this can hurt our rankings and if someone has experimented with this or has experience with this?
Technical SEO | | ElmarReizen0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
What happens when a link goes to a dead url on my site?
I noticed in Open Site Explorer, I have several incoming links going to dead urls because i re-organized my site. For example, there might be an incoming link to: sample.php?ID=8 The problem is that I moved the file to /subdir1 so it would be nice if it could link to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 BUT, on top of that, I have also changed the url to seo-friendly urls. So, really, it should link to /Category_Descripton/ProductName/8 and then get re-written to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 So, what are the implications of having these incoming links to dead urls other than the bad user experience. What are the implications from an SEO standpoint? What's the best way to fix this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | webtarget0