Over 500 thin URLs indexed from dynamically created pages (for lightboxes)
-
I have a client who has a resources section. This section is primarily devoted to definitions of terms in the industry. These definitions appear in colored boxes that, when you click on them, turn into a lightbox with their own unique URL.
Example URL: /resources/?resource=dlna
The information for these lightboxes is pulled from a standard page: /resources/dlna.
Both are indexed, resulting in over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content. My question is this:
Should they be de-indexed? Another option I'm knocking around is working with the client to create Skyscraper pages, but this is obviously a massive undertaking given how many they have.
Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
-
This was an issue that yoast came up with on an upgrade with wordpress in the middle of 2018. It may be worth a little research into how their "purge" plugin worked as it did exactly this.
Using the htaccess file simply tell google not to index the resource pages then they will naturally over time fall out of the search or you can purge by
- Log into the Google Search Console and select the desired website.
- Click on “Optimization” in the left-hand navigation.
- Click on “Remove URL” in the sub-menu.
- Click on the button “create a new request for removal” on this page.
Once this is done and they are set to no index. Problem solved.
-
I think the only way to do that is to delete the actual Resource page, since that's where the lightbox pulls the content. I don't want to delete these pages.
-
I would simply delete the file and then it will 404.
However, if you think that valuable links might be pointing to it, then I would do a 301 redirect to the most relevant page.
-
Thanks for the advice. Any idea on how to deindex just the lightbox URL? Never been in this position and I'd like to direct my client to the right resolution.
-
Thank you. My answer is then easy.
If this was my site, I would give the entire definition on the resource page and get rid of the fancy pants lightbox.
A page with 500 definitions is a lot. So I might divide them up into logical categories and optimize those pages for more specific queries.
If there are definitions that are of very high visitor interest, I would make a full page article about them and link to them from the resource page.
-
Nope. Almost none.
-
over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content
Are these pages pulling in much traffic from search? I have other thoughts but would like to consider this information before saying how I would handle this if it were my site.
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
-
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
URL Structure for Product Pages
Hi Moz Community. I'm in need of some URL structure advice for product pages. We currently have ~4,000+ products and I'm trying to determine whether I need a new URL structure from the previous site owners. There are two current product URL structures that exist in our website: 1.http://www.example.com/bracelets/gold-bracelets/1-1-10-ct-diamond-tw-slip-on-bangle-14k-pink-gold-gh-i1-i2/ (old URL structure)
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
2. http://www.example.com/gemstone-bracelet-prd-bcy-121189/ (new URL structure) The problem is that half of our products are still in the old structure (no one moved them forward), but at the same time I'm not sure if the new structure is optimized as much as possible. Every single gemstone bracelet, or whatever product will have the same url structure, only being unique with the product number at the end. Would it be better to change everything over to more product specific URLS. I.e. example.com/topaz-gemstone-dangle-bracelet. Thanks for your help!
-Reed0 -
If Google's index contains multiple URLs for my homepage, does that mean the canonical tag is not working?
I have a site which is using canonical tags on all pages, however not all duplicate versions of the homepage are 301'd due to a limitation in the hosting platform. So some site visitors get www.example.com/default.aspx while others just get www.example.com. I can see the correct canonical tag on the source code of both versions of this homepage, but when I search Google for the specific URL "www.example.com/default.aspx" I see that they've indexed that specific URL as well as the "clean" one. Is this a concern... shouldn't Google only show me the clean URL?
Technical SEO | | JMagary0 -
301: Dynamic URL to Static Page
I've been going around trying to get this dynamic url to redirect in the .htaccess file. I know I'm missing something but can't figure it out. Code: RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | ohlmanngroup
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^/dynamic-url.php?id=43$
RewriteRule ^$ http://static/page/url/inserted/here? [R=301,L] Suggestions?0 -
301 redirects and Dynamic URLs
I just ran my first diagnostic and one of my primary immediate problems are duplicate titles and duplicate content. My guess it that because the root URL http://sitename.com (which has not yet been redirected to www...) has generated an entire tree of content which is identical to the tree rooted at http://www.sitename.com. QUESTION: Do I need to do a redirect simply for the root url (sitename.com -> www.sitename.com) or do I now need to develop specific 301 redirects for each of the sub-nodes/pages? ie sitename.com/?q=about-us -> www.sitename.com/?q=about-us sitename.com/?q=our-team -> www.sitename.com/?q=our-team etc.
Technical SEO | | Barrycliff680 -
Page not being indexed
Hi all, On our site we have a lot of bookmaker reviews, and we are ranking pretty good for most bookmaker names as keywords, however a single bookmaker seems to have been shunned by Google. For a search "betsafe" in Denmark, this page does not appear among the top 50: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe All of our other review pages rank in top 10-20 for the bookmaker name as keyword. What to do if Google has "banned" a page? Best regards, Rasmus
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0 -
Getting Google to index new pages
I have a site, called SiteB that has 200 pages of new, unique content. I made a table of contents (TOC) page on SiteB that points to about 50 pages of SiteB content. I would like to get SiteB's TOC page crawled and indexed by Google, as well as all the pages it points to. I submitted the TOC to Pingler 24 hours ago and from the logs I see the Googlebot visited the TOC page but it did not crawl any of the 50 pages that are linked to from the TOC. I do not have a robots.txt file on SiteB. There are no robot meta tags (nofollow, noindex). There are no 'rel=nofollow' attributes on the links. Why would Google crawl the TOC (when I Pinglered it) but not crawl any of the links on that page? One other fact, and I don't know if this matters, but SiteB lives on a subdomain and the URLs contain numbers, like this: http://subdomain.domain.com/category/34404 Yes, I know that the number part is suboptimal from an SEO point of view. I'm working on that, too. But first wanted to figure out why Google isn't crawling the TOC. The site is new and so hasn't been penalized by Google. Thanks for any ideas...
Technical SEO | | scanlin0