Should I Remove This Subdirectory From Google?
-
On my site, I have a subdirectory.
It posts articles from a bunch of websites that my readers are interested in & links back to all of those sites. There is no original content in it.
There are over 1700 indexed pages in this subdirectory. The rest of my site has about 500 (all original content).
The search engine traffic for this subdirectory only accounts for 3.9% of my sites overall visits.
Should I consider removing this subdirectory? Could all the duplicate content be hurting the rankings of my legit pages?
What do you all think?
-
Upon further review, it looks like I'm getting about 150-200 search visits to the articles within that subd a week...I'm gonna keep it up.
It's easy enough to figure out which posts are getting the most search traffic, but it is going to be crazy removing only the ones which do not get that traffic...
If I see a huge panda like drop off in search traffic, then I'll pull the trigger. Until then, we will stick with it.
Thanks for the advice.
-
It's tough - I do think it boils down to the numbers. If you were talking about 1,700 pages and the rest of your site had 50K indexed pages, I'd probably say not to worry about it (unless, as @Dejan said, you experienced a traffic drop or other problems). When the rest of your site is 500 pages, though, I'd start to worry, especially with Panda updates hitting sites with too much copied content (even if legitimately syndicated).
The fact that your linking back does help (you're not trying to claim these are your articles), but if these pages, which are more than 75% of your index, only represent 4% of visits, I'd really start to question the usefulness and whether it's worth the potential SEO risk.
There might be a partial solution - you could NOINDEX a large chunk of the pages, but leave 50-100 of the articles, if those account for 90%+ of the traffic you're getting. Of course, that's going to take some analysis and is a bit trickier to implement, but it could let you keep most of that 3.9%.
I'd also see where that traffic is coming from - if it's 3.9% of total traffic, but only 0.9% of search traffic (mostly direct visits, bookmarks, etc.), then you've got even less to worry about if you de-index the whole subdirectory.
-
If it makes sense to have them there then leave it, however if you feel there has been a traffic drop then it may be worth investigating if it was these 1700 indexed articles that have caused it.
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
-
Metadescription not being pulled by Google? Yoast v SmartCrawl?
Hey guys, For whatever reason, Google isn't pulling the metadescriptions I've provided for a wordpress site I'm working on. We had both Yoast and SmartCrawl installed, so I thought maybe they were confusing Google and deactivated Yoast. Unfortunately, that didn't fix the issue. Instead of using the text I've plugged into SmartCrawl, Google is just using snippets from the blog posts... And it's happening for every single post, leading to a huge uptick in metadata issues in moz. Any idea how to fix this?? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | laurendavidson0 -
If Product Pages Perform Well In Google then Is It Possible That Category Page Can perform Well In Google?
Hi All, For my ecommerce site I have optimized my product pages very nicely like good images, detailed information about products, good reviews, implemented schema for my product and reviews and very perfect onpage. Now my query is if my products pages performing well in google then there are chances that my category page rank well in google too? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wright3350 -
URL, page title, item name - which is most important for google ranking
We are a bridal store and are able to use different information in the URL, Page title and item name. In item name we give the product a name for us to identify ie. Alex Lace Dress in Black/Nude, Ivory/Nude, Red/Red In Page Title we use the suppliers name and product code as well as the item name ie. Jadore j8075 Alex Lace Dress Online Australia URL = alex-lace-dress/ Are we using the correct format ? What could we do to improve them?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Removing entire site sections categories from an ecommerce store, best practices ?
Hi Whats best practice when removing entire site sections from an e-commerce store due to ending those lines and not having similar alternative pages to redirect them too ? Should you remove pages in GWT etc ? Any other measures to prevent probs such as 404 spikes etc ?? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
My Meta Description changes when i use different keyword in google search.
Hello everyone, I have a question for the community. I have a website with several articles and news that i manage. I set specific meta descriptions for every page but when i search in google it gives me back different meta descriptions depending on the keyword that i use to search. What i notice is that google looks in my page for the most relevant part of the text that combines with my keyword and gives me back that result. I thought that this only happen when i have an empty meta description. Anyone felt the same ? Best Ricardo www.meuportalfinanceiro.pt
On-Page Optimization | | Adclick0 -
Will Google penalize my website if I hide the H1 tag?
If I hide H1 tag (title on the homepage) with CSS, how Google handle with my site?
On-Page Optimization | | joeko0 -
Shall Google index a search result?
Hi, I've a website with about 1000 articles.Each article has one ore more keywords / tags. So I display these keywords at the article page and put a link to the intern search engine. (Like a tag cloud) The search engine lists als articles with the same keyword and creates a result page. This result page is indexed by Google. The search result contains the title of the article, a short description (150-300 chars.) and a link to the article. So, Google believes, that there are about 5.000 pages instead of 1.000 because auf the link to the search result pages. The old rule was for me: More pages in Google = better. But is this still true nowadays? Would be a "noindex, follow" better on these search result pages? (Is there a way to tell Google that this is a search result page?) Best wishes, Georg.
On-Page Optimization | | GeorgFranz0