Should I noindex user-created fundraising pages?
-
Hello Moz community!
I work for a nonprofit where users are able to create their own fundraising pages on the website for supporters to directly donate. Some of them are rarely used, others get updated frequently by the host. There are likely a ton of these on our site. Moz crawl says we have ~54K pages, and when I do a "site:[url]" search on Google, 90% of the first 100 results are fundraising pages.
These are not controlled by our staff members, but I'm wondering if meta noindexing these pages could have a big effect on our SEO rankings. Has anyone tried anything similar or know if this strategy could have legs for our site?
My only concern is whether users wouldn't be able to find their fundraising page in our Google CSE implemented on the website.
Any insight you fine folks could provide would be greatly appreciated!
-
I'd tread very carefully here as thing 1 and thing 2 seem to contradict each other at face value. You're right, Google can send traffic to a site in ways other than keywords, but it's not the norm. The next thing I'd look at is, hmm - how are we tracking keyword rankings? Is it an online, cloud based rank tracker that relies on you specifying all of (and all of the right) keywords to track? Most of those trackers track between 50 and 300 KWs (daily, weekly) but it's not uncommon for such sites to have 10,000+ keywords contributing. If they're not all in there, it's a bad sample you are looking at. Connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics. let it run for a few weeks, analyse the 'search query' data from within Google Analytics (which can be done once it's all hooked up). GSC only lets you export 1k keywords (usually, sometimes it can be more) but GA will take 5k and that's much better for your analysis. You might be surprised to find, those pages rank for more keywords than you thought. maybe hundreds of little ones, instead of a few big ones
-
Effectdigital is right in looking at your analytics and backlinks to help make this decision.
In the Moz case study we referenced earlier, they were getting rid of pages that didn't provide value at all to anyone. Those pages probably didn't have any links pointing to them at all. So it made sense to get rid of them.
Since your pages are providing value (it seems) and your getting 1/3 of your traffic coming into those pages, we would tread carefully on meta noindexing them.
You might only consider meta noindexing a group of them that haven't brought in any traffic this whole year and that don't have any links pointing to them. That way, you won't lose any existing traffic that your getting but you can see if the trimming helps your site's overall traffic and rankings.
-
Appreciate the word of caution, I'm relatively new and am looking for well-rounded opinions about the repercussions such a massive move could make for our site. As a response:
Thing #1: We don't have many fundraising pages that rank highly for keywords, as we're still working on juicing up our regular site pages as is to improve in the SERP results. I was mainly wondering whether the glut of fundraising pages could be harming our SERP results. Some certainly have duplicate content but that's beyond our control, and I'm not sure if that could significantly be harming our results. Any thoughts on that?
Thing #2: Great call on checking the data. YTD nearly 1/3 of our user sessions have landed on one of these fundraising pages. I'm guessing that's likely either the hosts using google to find their page and then subsequently log in, or friends searching for it on google and then navigating and donating. We do still have a Google Custom Search Engine on our site. Presumably people could find them that way?
If you have any additional opinions or feedback given what I detailed above, I'd very much appreciate it!
-
Be VERY careful
Thing #1) Just because you stop Google indexing and crawling some pages, that doesn't mean they will give that same traffic (keywords linking to those pages) to other URLs on your site. They may decide that your other URLs, do not satisfy the specific keywords connecting with the fundraiser URLs
Thing#2) CHECK. Go onto Google Analytics and actually check what percentage of your Google traffic (and overall traffic, I guess) comes specifically through these URLs. If it's like 2-3%, no big deal. If most of your traffic comes to and lands on these pages, no-indexing them all could be the single largest mistake you'll ever make
Blog posts and articles are fun but no substitute for checking your own, real, actual, factual data. Always always do that
-
Thanks! I've been wondering about it for awhile and actually stumbled upon this very article today - which prompted the question
-
Britney Muller, with Moz, did just that when she meta noindexed over 70,000 low quality profile pages created by users. As a result, Moz saw an increase in organic users, almost 9% the following month and then they saw a lift of 13.7% year-over-year for organic traffic the following month.
You can read all about it or watch the interview about it here: https://www.getcredo.com/britney-muller/
We think it's worth a try for sure.
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
-
Are AMP pages affecting mobile search visibility?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I've recently seen a fairly hefty drop in search visibility on Google mobile, from 12.8% to 4.1%. Desktop visibility is unaffected. The same search visibility drop is echoed in SEMRush. However, Google Analytics shows that our site traffic from mobile hasn't changed. The only thing I can think of is that we recently launched AMP pages. I know Google sometimes caches AMPs so they’re served off google domains. Could that mean that the cached version of the page is ranking rather than our own? That would explain the drop in visibility but stable traffic I think?! What other explanation could it be? Many thanks in advance, Kit
Moz Pro | | KitSmith0 -
High Page Authority / Low Domain Authority
I have been building links to the home page of my web site. At this point, the site has a DA of 22 and the home page has a PA of 35. I am a bit puzzled as to how the PA can be so much higher than DA. I suppose it might have something to do with the fact that most of the inbound links are going to the home page. Are there any other factors that might be contributing to this situation? Does it point to a weakness in our backlink profile?
Moz Pro | | NathanSchlink1230 -
How do I find out which pages are being indexed on my site and which are not?
Hi, I doing my first technical audit on my site. I am learning how to do an audit as i go and am a lost. I know some page won't be indexed but how do I: 1. Check the site for all pages, both indexed and not indexed 2. Run a report to show indexed pages only (i am presuming i can do this via screaming Frog or webmaster tool) 3. I can do a comparison between the two list and work out which pages are not being indexed. I'll then need to figure out way. I'll cross this bridge once i get to it Thanks Ben
Moz Pro | | benjmoz0 -
Are there any alerts available for when a page stops ranking in top 50?
Hi At the moment I am doing this manually through Moz by going to the keyword and seeing what urls are ranking for it. I was just wondering whether I am missing a trick on moz or any other programs that would send me an alert every time a page that is ranking suddenly drops out? Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | RedAntSolutions0 -
Can someone explain the attached on page error message?
Two weeks ago, I took down our mobile site and switched to one on dudamobile. However, for some reason, I keep getting this error/improvement message on my on page report. I do not see how I can have a cannocial problem with a page that is no longer there. Can someone explain that and what I can do about it? Thanks! eQTNRD6.png
Moz Pro | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Why am I getting 400 client errors on pages that work?
Hi, I just done the initial crawl on y domain and I sem to have 80 400 client errors. However when I visit the urls the pages are loading fine. Any ideas on why this is happening and how I can resolve the problem?
Moz Pro | | moesian0 -
Page and Domain Authority and other bits
Hi, I am in the process of finding blogs to have a few articles published with a couple of links in each. Articles will all be unique and relevant to the link I drop in and relevant in someway to the reader However I have a few questions. My site is a designer menswear site, so I have picked fashion and sports sites first and foremost to have the articles published. Now, I have a guy who owns about 30 different websites. 2 of them are sports based and about 10 are fashion based. Around $10-$15 an article. I have ran them all through the Open Site Explorer Tool and picked out the best ranked ones. Now my problem is, how do I know if its a good site to not only list an article on, but to pay for it as well. The sites page ranks are around the 30-45 range, the domains are around the 35-45 range. What is a good range to have? I know the higher the better but is 30-45 good enough to pay for? (I don't mind paying the $10 each (£7 my money) for each one) Also as he is quoted me in dollars, I assume there all USA based, so majority of users are USA based. Well I am UK based and only ship to the UK. Will this matter as much if I am trying to gain backlinks? Obviously a UK based site, would be ideal, but is it a case of getting more external links on the web for Google to find, as long as they are relevant to the user? Any help would be great. Thanks Will
Moz Pro | | WillBlackburn0 -
Which Google API do you use to creat a rank checking tool?
I can't seem to work this one out. Basically I want to make a very simple rank checker tool something similar to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ where a user simply type in a domain and a keyword and in return is shown the position within the results. The problem is I can’t work out which API's I need in order to build it, does anyone know what I need to poke about with? It must work with Google and ideally with Bing and the rest
Moz Pro | | therealmarkhall0