Pages with Little Content
-
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed.
I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed.
Here is an example page with very little content
-
If you've already cut internal links and they're only in RSS, I probably would NOINDEX them, personally. You're basically telling Google that they're low-value (for now, at least) but then you're letting them be [possibly] indexed and potentially diluting the rest of your index (and ranking power). That way, people can still access them, but you're not risking Panda issues or other problems.
Over time, as you add content and boost your domain authority and link profile, you can start phasing in more pages.
-
Hi As Brent has said you cannot prevent Google from crawling the site. Once the site is indexed and Google starts to visit the site more frequently it is likely at some point to find the pages. However, based on the limited information and more importantly the lack of any real unique content i would advise that you take what ever steps you can from limiting the visibility of these pages. I do not believe you will lose rank but you certainly will not gain any. Thanks
-
_First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most _
likely links to them?
Actually there are only currently links to the pages with an actual
description. I have disabled links to those with no description. The
way the site is set up at the moment means that a page is created,
but not necessarily linked to
(see [http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/live-music](http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/live-music)).
_After looking at your example page what if you made a unique _
_description for each artist / performer and then have a list _
_of events that is always changing under them that way you have _
_some type of unique content that would be helpful._
I think I'd have the same problem there would still be thousands of
artists (nevermind festivals etc). I do want to list as many events
as possible and I think my users would prefer a comprehensive number
of listings without descriptions rather than a small number of event
listings with descriptions. Some listings do have more substantial
descriptions e.g. [St Patrick's Day in Dublin](http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/arts-culture/festivals/st-patricks-festival-and-parade "St Patrick's Day")
My overall question is should I prevent Google from indexing pages
with little content (as the original example) or just let it
do it's thang au naturale?
-
Hi Andy,
First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most likely links to them? ( And if not how would users find these otherwise? )
After looking at your example page what if you made a unique description for each artist / performer and then have a list of events that is always changing under them that way you have some type of unique content that would be helpful.
-Brent
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 has my home page replaced my sub-category page for set of keywords? Happened 2x in last 2 weeks for day or so only to fix itself. What is going on?
Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page. See screenshot below. As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th. See screenshot below. Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months. We have done no recent link building to this page in years. I don't understand what is going on. This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic. I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem. I checked our Search Console. No messages. No manual web spam actions. Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic. Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on? serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cajohnson0 -
How I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
Website Does not index in any page?
I created a website www.astrologersktantrik.com 4 days ago and fetch it with google but still my website does not index on google as the keywords I use is with low competition but still my website does not appear on any keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ramansaab0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issues Reported in Moz Crawl Report
Hi all, We have a lot of 'Duplicate Page Content' issues being reported on the Moz Crawl Report and I am trying to 'get to the bottom' of why they are deemed as errors... This page; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/about-us/job-opportunities/ has (admittedly) very little content and is duplicated with; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/explorer-of-the-seas-2015/ This page is basically an image and has just a couple of lines of static content. Also duplicated with; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-lines/costa-cruises/costa-voyager/ This page relates to a single cruise ship and again has minimal content... Also duplicated with; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/faq/packing/ This is an FAQ page again with only a few lines of content... Also duplicated with; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/exclusive-canada-&-alaska-cruisetour/ Another page that just features an image and NO content... Also duplicated with; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/free-upgrades-on-cunard-2014-&-2015/?page_number=6 A cruise deals page that has a little bit of static content and a lot of dynamic content (which I suspect isn't crawled) So my question is, is the duplicate content issued caused by the fact that each page has 'thin' or no content? If that is the case then I assume the simple fix is to increase add \ increase the content? I realise that I may have answered my own question but my brain is 'pickled' at the moment and so I guess I am just seeking assurances! 🙂 Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
SEO-Friendly Method to Load XML Content onto Page
I have a client who has about 100 portfolio entries, each with its own HTML page. Those pages aren't getting indexed because of the way the main portfolio menu page works: It uses javascript to load the list of portfolio entries from an XML file along with metadata about each entry. Because it uses javascript, crawlers aren't seeing anything on the portfolio menu page. Here's a sample of the javascript used, this is one of many more lines of code: // load project xml try{ var req = new Request({ method: 'get', url: '/data/projects.xml', Normally I'd have them just manually add entries to the portfolio menu page, but part of the metadata that's getting loaded is project characteristics that are used to filter which portfolio entries are shown on page, such as client type (government, education, industrial, residential, industrial, etc.) and project type (depending on type of service that was provided). It's similar to filtering you'd see on an e-commerce site. This has to stay, so the page needs to remain dynamic. I'm trying to summarize the alternate methods they could use to load that content onto the page instead of javascript (I assume that server side solutions are the only ones I'd want, unless there's another option I'm unaware of). I'm aware that PHP could probably load all of their portfolio entries in the XML file on the server side. I'd like to get some recommendations on other possible solutions. Please feel free to ask any clarifying questions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaneJamison0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
Expired Content
Hi We have a listing website that has a huge amount of listings.These listings are changing all time, they become passive or deleted. We would like to choose the response code for the passive for deleted pages. Which response type must we use ? Redirect to last category with 301 Give 410 Gone response code Give 404 Response code which option would we choose ? and any ideas ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEMTurkey0