Should I use NoIndex on short-lived pages?
-
Hello,
I have a large number of product pages on my site that are relatively short-lived: probably in the region of a million+ pages that are created and then removed within a 24 hour period.
Previously these pages were being indexed by Google and did receive landings, but in recent times I've been applying a NoIndex tag to them.
I've been doing that as a way of managing our crawl budget but also because the 410 pages that we serve when one of these product pages is gone are quite weak and deliver a relatively poor user experience.
We're working to address the quality of those 410 pages but my question is should I be no-indexing these product pages in the first place?
Any thoughts or comments would be welcome.
Thanks.
-
Yep - Product category pages are already quite strong.
Part of whats behind the question is that I've previously come into contact with a "bigger sites rank better" SEO philosophy.
So when I see that we've got over 1m+ pages in Search Console that are excluded on the basis of NoIndex tags it makes me wonder if I'm missing a trick!
-
Hi Philip,
I do. If you can provide more details on your site, I can give you additional advice on how to structure it. If it's an ecommerce site, sometimes what you may want to do is optimize the product category pages and no-index the indivdiual product pages (especially if they cycle out).
I hope that helps!
John
-
Thanks John.
By "short term" do you mean until we've improved the UX on the 410 pages?
Then remove the noindex after that?
-
Hi Phillip! I would say yes to no-index as a short-term solution.
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
-
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve0 -
Using Pagination for eComm Reviews Pages
Hi All, An eComm site has product pages where only 10 customer reviews are found in the source code on the product page, no matter how many reviews the product actually has. ALL reviews (including the 10 displayed on the product page) are located on a subdomain, split into many pages dependong on how many reviews a certain product has (some have well over 100 unique reviews). Reviews page: http://reviews.americanmuscle.com/0065-en_us/charcoalamr-18x8-0512-pirelli-stan/american-muscle-wheels-amr-charcoal-wheel-pirelli-tire-kit-18x8-05-14-all-reviews/reviews.htm Corresponding product page: http://www.americanmuscle.com/charcoalamr-18x8-0512-pirelli-stan.html I'm fearing a Panda related problem here, especially since thousands of products have only 1 or two reviews, duplicated on the reviews.americanmuscle.com page and the corresponding product page. I also do not want to lose the unique content on the second and third reviews pages simply by noindexing/canonicaling them to the product page. My question is whether or not I can paginate the reviews.am pages in a way that the product page is "page 1" and the first reviews page is "page 2," second reviews.am page is "page 3" and so forth. Are there issues associated with domain-to-subdomain pagination? Can I utilize the pagination tab in this manner in the first place? There are currently more than 57,000 of these review.americanmuscle.com pages in the index that I would like to clean up so any/all suggestions are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Parent pages
Hi guys, A website has many venue pages, for example: www.example.com/venue/paris For some reason the parent www.example.com/venue/ is 301 redirecting to a minor page elsewhere on the website. Should I remove the 301 redirect and then create www.example.com/venue/ page that then links to all the venues? My thinking is: Google will expect there to be a /venue/ 'parent' page So if the parent page is redirecting to a minor page elsewhere within the website its telling Google all the venues like paris must be even less important. Should I do it? Any suggestions from fellow SEOMoz's would be appreciated! All the best Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
Google is displaying my pages path instead of URLS (Pages name)
Does anyone knows why Google is displaying my pages path instead of the URL in the search results, i discoverd that while am searching using a keyword of mine then i copied the link http://www.smarttouch.me/services-saudi/web-services/web-design and found all related results are the same, could anyone one tell me why is that and is it really differs? or the URL display is more important than the Path display for SEO!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ali8810 -
To noindex or not to noindex
Our website lets users test whether any given URL or keyword is censored in China. For each URL and keyword that a user looks up, a page is created, such as https://en.greatfire.org/facebook.com and https://zh.greatfire.org/keyword/freenet. From a search engines perspective, all these pages look very similar. For this reason we have implemented a noindex function based on certain rules. Basically, only highly ranked websites are allowed to be indexed - all other URLs are tagged as noindex (for example https://en.greatfire.org/www.imdb.com). However, we are not sure that this is a good strategy and so are asking - what should a website with a lot of similar content do? Don't noindex anything - let Google decide what's worth indexing and not. Noindex most content, but allow some popular pages to be indexed. This is our current approach. If you recommend this one, we would like to know what we can do to improve it. Noindex all the similar content. In our case, only let overview pages, blog posts etc with unique content to be indexed. Another factor in our case is that our website is multilingual. All pages are available (and equally indexed) in Chinese and English. Should that affect our strategy?References:https://zh.greatfire.orghttps://en.greatfire.orghttps://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agreatfire.org
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Should I be using rel canonical here?
I am reorganizing the data on my informational site in a drilldown menu. So, here's an example. One the home page are several different items. Let's say you clicked on "Back Problems". Then, you would get a menu that says: Disc problems, Pain relief, paralysis issues, see all back articles. Each of those pages will have a list of articles that suit. Some articles will appear on more than one page. Should I be worried about these pages being partially duplicates of each other? Should I use rel-canonical to make the root page for each section the one that is indexed. I'm thinking no, because I think it would be good to have all of these pages indexed. But then, that's why I'm asking!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0