Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
-
Hello everyone,
Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages?
For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page?
The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
-
Thank you Chris for your in-depth answer, you just confirmed what I suspected.
To clarify though, what I am trying to save here by noindexing those subsequent pages is "indexing budget" not "crawl budget". You know the famous "indexing cap"? And also, tackling possible "duplicate" or "thin" content issues with such "similar but different" pages... fact is, our website has been hit by Panda several times, we recovered several times as well, but we have been hit again with the latest quality update of last June, and we are trying to find a way to get out of it once for all. Hence my attempt to reduce the number of similar indexed pages as much as we can.
I have just opened a discussion on this "Panda-non-sense" issue, and I'd like to know your opinion about it:
https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues
Thank you again.
-
Hi Fabrizo,
That's a tricky one given the sheer volume of pages/music on the site. Typically the cleanest way to handle all of this is to offer up a View All page and Canonical back to that but in your case, a View All pages would scroll on forever!
Canonical is not the answer here. It's made for handling duplicate pages like this:
www.website.com/product1.html
www.website.com/product1.html&sid=12432In this instance, both pages are 100% identical so the canonical tag tells Google that any variation of product1.html is actually just that page and should be counted as such. What you've got here is pagination so while the pages are mostly the same, they're not identical.
Instead, this is exactly what rel=prev/next is for which you've already looked into. It's very hard to find recent information on this topic but the traditional advice from Google has been to implement prev/next and they will infer the most important page (typically page one) from the fact that it's the only page that has a rel=next but no rel=prev (because there is no previous page). Apologies if you already knew all of this; just making sure I didn't skim over anything here. Google also says these pages will essentially be seen as a single unit from that point and so all link equity will be consolidated toward that block of pages.
Canonical and rel=next/prev do act separately so by all means if you have search filters or anything else that may alter the URL, a canonical tag can be used as well but each page here would just point back to itself, not back to page 1.
This clip from Google's Maile Ohye is quite old but the advice in here clears a few things up and is still very relevant today.
With that said, the other point you raised is very valid - what to do about crawl budget. Google also suggests just leaving them as-is since you're only linking to the first 5 pages and any links beyond that are buried so deep in the hierarchy they're seen as a low priority and will barely be looked at.
From my understanding (though I'm a little hesitant on this one) is that noindexed pages do retain their link equity. Noindex doesn't say 'don't crawl me' (also meaning it won't help your crawl budget, this would have to be done through Robots.txt), it says 'don't include me in your index'. So on this logic it would make sense that links pointing to a noindexed page would still be counted.
-
You are right, hard to give advice without the specific context.
Well, here is the problem that I am facing: we have an e-commerce website and each category has several hundreds if not thousands of pages... now, I want just the first page of each category page to appear in the index in order to not waste the index cap and avoid possible duplicate issues, therefore I want to noindex all subsequent pages, and index just the first page (which is also the most rich).
Here is an example from our website, our piano sheet music category page:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html
I want that first page to be in the index, but not the subsequent ones:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html?cp=2
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html?cp=3
etc...
After playing with canonicals and rel,next, I have realized that Google still keeps those unuseful pages in the index, whereas by removing them could help with both index cap issues and possible Panda penalties (too many similar and not useful pages). But is there any way to keep any possible link-equity of those subsequent pages by noindexing them? Or maybe the link equity is anyway preserved on those pages and on the overall domain as well? And, better, is there a way to move all that possible link equity to the first page in some way?
I hope this makes sense. Thank you for your help!
-
Apologies for the indirect answer but I would have to ask "why"?
If these pages are almost identical and you only want one of them to be indexed, in most situations the users would probably benefit from there only being that one main page. Cutting down on redundant pages is great for UX, crawl budget and general site quality.
Maybe there is a genuine reason for it but without knowing the context it's hard to give accurate info on the best way to handle it
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
-
Is single H1 tag still best practice?
Hi Guys, Is having a single h1 tag still best practice for SEO? Guessing multiple h1 tags dilute the value of the tag and keywords within the tag. Thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
Multiple Landing Pages and Backlinks
I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites. The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites. I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it). I also want a different landing page to rank for each term. The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search. Each one targets a different county. However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page. Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy? Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shauna70840 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richardo24hr0 -
NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW
Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> Is the tag above the same as: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"> Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0