Should I use NoIndex on short-lived pages?
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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.
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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!
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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
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Thanks John.
By "short term" do you mean until we've improved the UX on the 410 pages?
Then remove the noindex after that?
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Hi Phillip! I would say yes to no-index as a short-term solution.
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