Our subdomain hosts content that can not be optimized (static videos) - should I de-index it?

[masonmorse]

We host static tours on a subdomain that points to the video tour host.  I can not add meta or optimize any of these video pages and there are thousands.   Should I de-index the entire subdomain?  I am seeing errors for no meta, dup content etc in MOZ reporting.

If yes, do I add the Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ to the primary domain's website/CMS or in DNS records ?  Our web company is saying the no follow needs to be added in DNS but I feel like it should be added to the robots.txt file if SERP's are going to acknowledge the sub is no longer to be crawled and the primary is no longer to be penalized.

Thank you so much in advance!

[masonmorse]

Thanks you Serge!  Sorry for the delay - I appreciate your help so so much!

So...

the primary is masonmorse.com

the subdomain is tours.masonmorse.com - all the content on the subdomain can not be optimized and there are thousands of video pages that all appear the same (they load them by broker name) - it has no other content and we do not want these to be indexed (we post them elsewhere and optimize) nor do we want to be penalized for the duplicate content and missing meta.

I thought our web company could ad the disallow txt file on the main site (masonmorse.com) but they are telling me I need to add it to the DNS record.  Could you guide me to where the disallow needs to be added since the web company we work with seems to not understand my request at all.

Thank you!

[sergeystefoglo]

Hi there,

A few things:

• If there are thousands of pages on your site that only contain a video per page, that would be considered thin content from an SEO perspective. If you are trying to fix that I would recommend adding a noindex tag to all of the video pages, resubmitting those URLs to search console (or wait until Google crawls them), and then once the pages are removed from in the index I would add a disallow rule in the robots.txt file to prevent Google from crawling them.
• Another question: does the subdomain have any other content? Are the videos used elsewhere? It sounds like the videos themselves could be valuable from a business perspective and SEO is only one part of a site's success - I'd be thinking about how else I could utilize them in search (or other channels).
• Happy to look further if you want to post the subdomain - hopefully I understand correctly.

Hope that helps!