To noindex and follow or noindex no follow?
-
We have to greatly scale back on one of our services and focus on the other more successful ones. I need to figure out what to do with all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back.
Just to be clear, we aren't getting rid of the service. So they still want the pages on the website, but it is better for us to have more link juice going to the other service pages, more of our content ratio to be around the more profitable services, etc.
So, should I no-index/no-follow all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back on? Or should I no-index/follow all the pages relating the service we are cutting back on?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
+1 for EGOL
I would play with the pricing strategy instead of using noindex and nofollow on my site. These unwanted service pages might have valuable Page Authority and pass link juice in internal navigation, so noindex and nofollow can potentially hurt the overall organic search performance of your site.
If you don't want Google to crawl these pages looking for new information, simply block crawling in robots.txt but leave them in Google's index.
-
If I have a limited supply of an item, I raise prices so that I make a maximum amount from the stock on hand. I do the same if I am selling a service that is billed by the hour or by the job and I need to limit its availability. I allow the customer to decide if they want what I have at the price I want to receive.
If I have other products that are close to what I am short on, I will remove the short supply product from the category page competition. That will allow people on my site to see comparable products, but anyone who is searching for that product by name might still find my item in search. For that reason, I would allow one or two links to those pages on the site, but not give that item a "noindex".
The above are pricing plays.
For SEO plays, limiting the number of links that enter the pages that are in limited supply will allow pagerank that originally went into them to flow to other pages. This was very effective ten years ago when pagerank flow was important. Today there are a lot of other items in the algo and on-site connectivity to a page is not as important. However, cutting down the internal links into a page still might be slightly valuable.
-
I would think no-index/no-follow would make the most sense in this case.
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
-
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
Is it good or bad to add noindex for empty pages, which will get content dynamically after some days
We have followers, following, friends, etc pages for each user who creates account on our website. so when new user sign up, he may have 0 followers, 0 following and 0 friends, but over period of time he can get those lists go up. we have different pages for followers, following and friends which are allowed for google to index. When user don't have any followers/following/friends, those pages looks empty and we get issue of duplicate content and description too short. so is it better that we add noindex for those pages temporarily and remove noindex tag when there are at least 2 or more people on those pages. What are side effects of adding noindex when there is no data on those page or benefits of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swapnil120 -
Canonicle & rel=NOINDEX used on the same page?
I have a real estate company: www.company.com with approximately 400 agents. When an agent gets hired we allow them to pick a URL which we then register and manage. For example: www.AGENT1.com We then take this agent domain and 301 redirect it to a subdomain of our main site. For example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet
Agent1.com 301’s to agent1.company.com We have each page on the agent subdomain canonicled back to the corresponding page on www.company.com
For example: agent1.company.com canonicles to www.company.com What happened is that google indexed many URLS on the subdomains, and it seemed like Google ignored the canonical in many cases. Although these URLS were being crawled and indexed by google, I never noticed any of them rank in the results. My theory is that Google crawled the subdomain first, indexed the page, and then later Google crawled the main URL. At that point in time, the two pages actually looked quite different from one another so Google did not recognize/honor the canonical. For example:
Agent1.company.com/category1 gets crawled on day 1
Company.com/category1 gets crawled 5 days later The content (recently listed properties for sale) on these category pages changes every day. If Google crawled the pages (both the subdomain and the main domain) on the same day, the content on the subdomain and the main domain would look identical. If the urls are crawled on different days, the content will not match. We had some major issues (duplicate content and site speed) on our www.company.com site that needed immediate attention. We knew we had an issue with the agent subdomains and decided to block the crawling of the subdomains in the robot.txt file until we got the main site “fixed”. We have seen a small decrease in organic traffic from google to our main site since blocking the crawling of the subdomains. Whereas with Bing our traffic has dropped almost 80%. After a couple months, we have now got our main site mostly “fixed” and I want to figure out how to handle the subdomains in order to regain the lost organic traffic. My theory is that these subdomains have a some link juice that is basically being wasted with the implementation of the robots.txt file on the subdomains. Here is my question
If we put a ROBOTS rel=NOINDEX on all pages of the subdomains and leave the canonical (to the corresponding page of the company site) in place on each of those pages, will link juice flow to the canonical version? Basically I want the link juice from the subdomains to pass to our main site but do not want the pages to be competing for a spot in the search results with our main site. Another thought I had was to place the NOIndex tag only on the category pages (the ones that seem to change every day) and leave it off the product (property detail pages, pages that rarely ever change). Thank you in advance for any insight.0 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL. Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website? I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.0 -
Doubt with no follow links: disavow or no action?
We have a google penalty (artificial links) we have checked our link profile with link detox, and we found that a group of links that has no follow tag have been classified as toxic (stats websites mostly). But should we remove those links or what? They are no follow, it shoud be enough. Should we include this links on the spreadsheet anyway? Should we include and add "no action taken"? How would you proceed in that case? Note: I know link detox is not great, but it helped us to collect data. But we have now to make decisions about the results, and I'm new on this and I have doubts. I would appreciate your help Thank you!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
So You No-Follow Privacy Policy Pages etc?
site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Some people have recently suggested my homepage is giving out to much PR. Do I need to no-follow the "about us", "Customer Service" and "contact us" pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0