Dynamic Pages with No Results Causing Thin Content
-
Hi Mozers,
We have dynamic listing pages that pull in clinical trial results for specific disease types. Sometimes diseases have clinical trials and sometimes they don't. This means that sometimes the page will have zero results and sometimes it will return results.
We have a sizable number of these so that when there are zero results, these pages look like thin content.
What is the recommended method of dealing with this?
Is there a way of doing a conditional noindex where the page is indexed if results are pulled in and and not indexed when the page returns zero results?
If we can do this, should we? Will it confuse Google and send negative signals?
Any guidance/thoughts are much appreciated!
Yael
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
-
Why is my page not showing in Google results
Hi, My website chka.org is showing up in Google but this page is not : http://www.chka.org/kickboxing-classes-nyc/ I cannot figure it out why. I submitted in manually to be crawled and it showed up for a day or two and then it disappeared again. The website is not copy pasted, it has unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leokadiarapczynska0 -
Wrong page ranking for keyword - should I move the better content over?
We have a page which is outranking another page for a keyword that is very important. The page that is lower in the rankings has far better content. I think this is happening due to links as well as the url structure. domain.com/ranking/notranking Here is the page we want to rank: http://bit.ly/1vqhSoZ Here is the page that is higher in rankings: http://bit.ly/1vA1wXQ So I think I should just move the content over from /notranking, to /ranking. The content is clearly better on the lower ranking page but I think due to links the /ranking page is higher in SERPS. So I guess my question is, would it be wise to move all that content over, and then 301 redirect the old page? Or leave the way it is and hopefully Google will get it right over time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DemiGR1 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
What would cause all main pages to go from various PR1 PR2 PR3 to PR Unranked?
Weird, my rankings have fallen on one of my sites and all the main pages that were ranking are now PR unranked. We did ad some domains to a disavow file, but nothing major that should have had an impact like this. Pages are all allowed to be indexed and not blocked and are currently indexed in Google. Can Google just come around and decide they don't like these pages anymore and PR unrank them all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Add noindex,nofollow prior to removing pages resulting in 404's
We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess. Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404. The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is: Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's? Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Pages with Little Content
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed. I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed. Here is an example page with very little content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andywozhere0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990 -
Block all search results (dynamic) in robots.txt?
I know that google does not want to index "search result" pages for a lot of reasons (dup content, dynamic urls, blah blah). I recently optimized the entire IA of my sites to have search friendly urls, whcih includes search result pages. So, my search result pages changed from: /search?12345&productblue=true&id789 to /product/search/blue_widgets/womens/large As a result, google started indexing these pages thinking they were static (no opposition from me :)), but i started getting WMT messages saying they are finding a "high number of urls being indexed" on these sites. Should I just block them altogether, or let it work itself out?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhutchings0