Third party pages
-
Suppose you are using a third party tool such as an affiliate program. Typically, all the files are organized under one subdirectory. In addition, you may have little or no ability to modify any of the files in terms of SEO. Would you recommend hiding the entire subdirectory with a noindex?
Best,
Christopher -
I am unclear on what you are asking. The only thing I can share based on your question is to noindex any content you don't wish Google to index or otherwise have concerns about.
-
If I noindex all links from my pages to the main page of the affiliate program, and Google can still see all the other pages within the affiliate subdirectory, is that OK? In other words, if I put a noindex firewall between my pages and the third party pages, is it OK that the third party pages exist in a subdirectory on my site?
Best,
Christopher -
I would recommend using the noindex meta tag over blocking pages with the robots.txt file. Either will achieve the same result, but the noindex tag is a superior solution for several reasons:
-
the noindex tag will allow a crawler to see the rest of the page and for your PR to continue it's natural flow throughout your site.
-
there are times when a robots.txt file is deleted or modified in error, and then you have a big headache on your hands. Even if a meta tag is erased, it would just affect a single page so the damage is a lot more manageable.
-
-
I should have been more clear. The affiliate code that we licensed tracks the referrals from our affiliates and pays commissions for conversions to sales. We installed the package in a subdirectory. While the package does allow some customization, the code is not written to be modified. A number of pages have the same titles.
Per your suggestion, I added a Disallow in the robots.txt to keep the bots away from that subdirectory.
Best,
Christopher -
You should have the ability to completely control any and all content which appears on your site. An affiliate program may provide images, suggested text, and may have certain requirements such as always including certain phrases, etc. That is fine, but not entire content blocks.
If you are sharing any content, affiliate or otherwise, which is not under your control or is duplicated on other sites, then yes, I would recommend the noindex tag being applied to the content.
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
-
Why are my pages de-indexed?
<form id="form-t3_37nfib9dz" class="usertext" action="http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/37nfib/why_were_my_pages_deindexed/#"> Hello all, I am very new to SEO. For some reason many of the pages on my site were de-indexed. Specifically the ones linked from this page: However other pages, like the ones linked from this page and this page were not de-indexed. http://www.lawyerconnection.ca/practice-areas/car-accident-injury-lawyers/[1] However the pages linked from this page were not de-indexed: http://www.lawyerconnection.ca/practice-areas/slip-and-fall-lawyers/[2] http://www.lawyerconnection.ca/podcastresources/[3] That first page itself was not de-indexed, just the site that it links to. It just happened today, so maybe I am jumping the gun but I doubt it. When I enter the page into google webmaster tools again and press fetch, one of the child pages, it re-indexes. What could be the problem here? I had someone re-write the content for every city but I have a feeling that there is less differences in the car accidents pages? Is this considered duplicated content do you think? Am I making some other mistake I can't think of? Is it just a one day blip (I doubt it) Let me know, thanks. </form>
On-Page Optimization | | RafeTLouis0 -
Too many on-page links
Hi, I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages. The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow... Thanks, Amelia
On-Page Optimization | | CommT0 -
On Page Optimization Report
Does this tool also guard against an instance of over-optimization or keyword-spamming?
On-Page Optimization | | webfeatus0 -
Duplicate Page Content on Empty Manufacturer Pages
I work for an internet retailer that specializes in pet supplies and medications. I was going through the Crawl Diagnostics for our website, and I saw in the Duplicate Page Content section that some of our manufacturer pages were getting flagged. The way our site is set up is that when products are discontinued we mark them as discontinued and use 301 redirects to redirect their URLs to other relevant products, brands, or our homepage. We do the same thing with brand and manufacturer pages if all of their products are discontinued. 90% of the time, this is a manual process. However, the other 10% of the time certain products come and go automatically as part of our inventory system with one of our fulfillment partners. This can sometimes create empty manufacturer pages. I can't redirect these empty pages because there's a chance that products will be brought back in stock and the page will be populated again. What can we do so that these pages won't get marked as duplicates while they're empty? Write unique short descriptions about the companies? Would the placement of these short descriptions matter--top of the page under the category name vs bottom of the page underneath where the products would go? The links in the left sidebar, top, and in the footer our part of our site architecture, so those are always going to be the same. To contrast, here's what a manufacturer page with products looks like: Thanks! http://www.vetdepot.com/littermaid-manufacturer.html
On-Page Optimization | | ElDude0 -
Should I autogenerate 25k pages?
My main product is database conversion software. As we support tons of databases, it's pretty easy to generate thousands of pages simply by creating a template and changing source/target database name, some information on how to connect etc. Of course, getting links to that many autogenerated pages is close to impossible. So, not wanting to endanger my main site (http://www.spectralcore.com) I created a separate site (minisite) for this product alone (http://www.fullconvert.com). In two months this new site is live, it got to the point of having over 1k visitors per month. That's for a site with no inbound links or history. Now, my question is - should I create equivalent thing on my main site, with different template to avoid duplicate content - and leverage history and authority - or Google can get me penalized for this practice. I don't think 25k generated pages are a bad thing, they simply provide for tons of highly targeted landing pages. Am I wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | metadata0 -
Changing of title page and description
Can I ask how long after changing the Title and Description tags on a website do people have to wait to see these changes reflected in Google? I changed a site of mine a couple of weeks back, pinged the site to google and had well over 5,000 googlebots to the page (not a result of pinging, I get that anyway), yet Google continues to display the old listing. Any secret techniques to speeding this up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Why is this page ranking highest?
I've just used Open Site Explorer to compare some sites whose (unpaid) Google ranking I aspire to. They all have higher authority than my site, but the top ranking site out of the 3 I've looked at has the lowest Page Authority, hardly and links (when the others have hundreds), lowest page rank and lowest page trust. In fact, when you look at the top ranking page (ranks #1), it does not even have the search term in it as a complete phrase. One thing I do notice is that it does have 100,000s of linking root domains from one linking root domain. So how can it rank number one on Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Beemer0 -
Pages not cached
Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0