Can adding "noindex" help with quality penalizations?
-
Hello Moz fellows,
I have another question about content quality and Panda related penalization.
I was wondering this: If I have an entire section of my site that has been penalized due to thin content, can adding "noindex,follow" to all pages belonging to that section help de-penalizing the rest of the site in the short term, while we work to improve those penalized pages, which is going to take a long time? Can that be considered a "short term solution" to improve the overall site scoring on Google index while we work to improve those penalized pages, and, once ready, we remove the "noindex" tag?
I am eager to know your thoughts on this possible strategy.
Thank you in advance to everyone!
-
Thank you for your posting, but I made further research on all this, and I tend to disagree with what you state.
It is now my understanding that if you remove a page from the index, that content is no longer considered by Google, because it is actually "out of the index"... therefore, if, let's say, a specific page or a specific section of the site which could have caused a site-wide "content" penalty is removed from the index, those pages are no longer affecting any algorithmic calculation on the quality of the site from a "contents" stand point, and such alleged "content-related penalty" should be lifted.
Anyone else can confirm that?
-
Hi Fabrizo,
I agree with Andy's response up above. No indexing is not as good as removing the content from the website altogether, but it still can work as long as there are no links or sitemaps that lead Google back to the low quality content.
No indexing the pages won't be a permanent solution, only a temporary one that might help you in the meantime.
-
I am sorry, but I haven't received an affirmative answer to my last inquiry above...
-
Thank you Andy for your reply.
While I was waiting for an answer here, I made further research, and it looks like this can be a good strategy to cope with Panda related penalties, at least until the "bad content" is updated and improved:
https://moz.com/community/q/noindex-vs-page-removal-panda-recovery
Your thoughts?
Thank you again!
-
Hi Fabrizio,
Yes, and no.
I have seen this work in the past and I have also seen it make no difference. My feeling these days is that no-indexing doesn't solve the issue, even while being worked on, as I have seen more occurrences of it not working.
How big a problem are you trying to deal with? I did help a company with 37k pages recover from Panda a while ago, but we have to do some pretty hefty trimming of the site in order to get it back into good shape again. There issue was that thousands of pages all had big pieces of the same content on many similar pages, so we cut out a lot of the problem areas and pulled the site into something that resembled a bit more sense.
-Andy
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
-
Call for Help. Hit Badly with "Medic" and another 30% Loss with Sept 28th Update
Hi Everyone, I am not sure how this is all happening. We have been online for about 15 years, and now we are at our lowest amount of traffic in about 10 years. Our sites are www.bestpricenutrition.com and www.mysupplementstore.com. We sell commodity items, but I have focused on unique product descriptions, tons of UGC, blog posts and guides for awhile now and it has always done us well. Until as of late. This is what I feel led up to this, but I am hoping there is something I missed. May 1st, 2018: Migrated www.bestpricenutrition.com and www.mysupplementstore.com from Shopify. Similar sites, but almost all unique content. We purchased www.mysupplementstore.com about 8 years ago. A ton of traffic and sales, which is why we didn't just redirect it. Around May 25th: www.mysupplementstore.com took a big hit and lost almost 40% of its traffic. Nothing happened to www.bestpricenutrition.com, we actually increased traffic. Aug 1st Update: www.mysupplementstore.com lost another 25% of its traffic. www.bestpricenutrition.com lost about 40% of it's traffic. Sept 28th: Nothing happened to www.mysupplementstore.com, but www.bestpricenutrition.com lost another 30% of it's traffic. So I have been trying to figure out if there is anything technically wrong, but doesn't seem so. These are issues we discovered in August. During the migration, the reviews from each site were syndicated to both websites. There were 1000's. This was resolved in mid August. During the migration, the company doing the migration pushed our blog posts to both websites. 100's of blog posts duplicated to each website. This was resolved mid August. We found that a disgruntled employee instead writing unique content for our product pages, she was copying them one from another. This was about 100 product pages, which we have since resolved. What's Left I noticed on www.bestpricenutrition.com that we have 100's of blog posts that are getting hardly any traffic. I had trimmed www.mysupplementstore.com of this low traffic content. I am working on www.bestpricenutrition.com still. I have been in this industry since 2003, survived 2012, but have exhausted everything I know to figure this out. It's another sob story I know, but trying to keep everyone's job alive here, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Marking Ads As Ads
In marking paid ads as "advertisement" for the sake of Google organic, if you have a block of small ads, do you have to mark each and every one as an advertisement? For instance, let's say you have a block of small ads in the right column... mark each one or just at the top or what? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
What our peoples list from from 1 to 10 the most important "on page" Factors
we are all at different stages in our SEO and all have different skills and experiences would like to see if people have the same list or similar with this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReSEOlve0 -
Can SEO increase a page's Authority? Or can Authority only be earned via #RCS?
Hi all. I am asking this question to purposefully provoke a discussion. The CEO of the company where I am the in-house SEO sent me a directive this morning. The directive is to take our Website from a PR3 site to a PR5....in 6 months. Now, I know Page Rank is a bit of a deprecated concept, but I'm sure you would agree that "Authority" is still crucial to ranking well. When he first sent me the directive it was worded like this "I want a plan in place with the goal being to "beat" a specific competitor in 6 months." When I prodded him to define "beat," i.e. did he mean "outrank" for every keyword, he answered that he wanted our site to have the same "Authority" that this particular competitor has. So I am left pondering this question: Is it possible for SEO to increase the authority of a page? Or does "Authority" come from #RCS? The second part of this question is what would you do if you were in my shoes? I have been devoting huge amounts of time on technical SEO because the Website is a mess. Because I've dedicated so much time to technical issues, link-earning has taken a back seat. In my mind, why would anyone want to link to a crappy site that has serious technical issues (slow load times, no persistent cart, lots of 404s, etc)? Shouldn't we make the site awesome before trying to get people to link to us? Given this directive to improve our site's "Authority" - would you scrap the technical SEO and go whole hog into a link-earning binge, or would you hunker down and pound away at the technical issues? Which one would you do first if you couldn't do both at the same time? Comments, thoughts and insights would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo1 -
RSS "fresh" content with static page
Hi SEOmoz members, Currently I am researching my competitor and noticed something what i dont really understand. They have hundreds of static pages that dont change, the content is already the same for over 6 months. Every time a customer orders a product they use their rss feed to publish: "Customer A just bought product 4" When i search in Google for product 4 in the last 24 hours, its always their with a new publishing date but the same old content. Is this a good SEO tactic to implant in my own site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MennoO0 -
How to remove "Results 1 - 20 of 47" from Google SERP Snippet
We are trying to optimise our SERP snippet in Google to increase CTR, but we have this horrid "Results 1 - 20 of 47" in the description. We feel this gets in the way of the message and so wish to remove it, but how?? Any ideas apart from removing the paging from the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedyseo0 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0