De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
-
Hi all,
We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products.
Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers.
Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this:
- 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL.
- If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL.
- When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool
- This would be an example of an old URL:
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 - This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue
I have to specific questions:
- Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above?
- What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site".
And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business.Best regards,
TalkInThePark -
Thanks a lot, Tom. Time will tell...
Just one last thing:
what damage are you (and Google) thinking of when advising against removing URLs on a large scale through GWMT?Personally, I think Google says so only because they want to keep as much information possible in their index.
-
Thanks for the PM, I can now appreciate the problem a little more.
I think it's something that you should not rush. What you've done seems the best thing you can do for now.
Longer term, I'd look at your CMS options!
-
Yes, I have put a conditional meta robots "noindex" on all pages whose URL contains more than 2 GET elements. It is also present on URLs containing parameters of little or no SEO value (e.g. the "price" parameter).
Regarding the nofollow directive, my plan is to not put it in the head but on the individual links pointing to URLs that should not be indexed. If we happen to get a backlink to one of these noindexed pages, I want the link value to get passed on to listed product pages.
My big worrie is what should I do if this de-indexation process takes forever...
-
If you could put a conditional meta tag in to the source code, that will show the nofollow tag if the URL contains more than 3 GET elements, then that might help?
You seem to have already thought hard about your options, and they sound ok. Let's just wait to see whether any Gurus are about to shout stop!
-
Thanks for answering that quickly, Tom!
We cannot robots.txt disallow all URLs. We get quite a lot of organic traffic to these URLs. In july, organic traffic landing on results pages gave us approximately $85 000 in revenue. Also, what is good to know is that pages resulting from searching and browsing share the same URL - the search phrase is treated as just another filtering parameter in the URL.
Keeping the same URL structure is part of my preferred, 2-step solution:
- Meta Robots "noindex" unwanted results pages (the overwhelming majority)
- When our Google index has shrunken enough, put rel=nofollow on internal links pointing to those results pages in order to prevent bots from crawling them.
I have actually implemented step 1 (as of yesterday). The solution I was describing in my original post is my last resort solution. I wanted to get a professional opinion on that one in order to know if I should rule it out or not.
Unfortunately, I cannot disclose our company name here (I have a feeling our competitors use Seomoz as well :)). But I'll send you some links in a private message.
-
If I were you I'd keep the same URL structure. You're correct in thinking this won't be a quick fix.
First, use the robots.txt to disallow robots access to the search pages.
Don't remove all results just yet from GWT, this will be a long task and might damage your sites performance.
Could you provide some links to your site? I'll have a closer look.
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
-
Which pages should I index or have in my XML sitemap?
Hi there, my website is ConcertHotels.com - a site which helps users find hotels close to concert venues. I have a hotel listing page for every concert venue on my site - about 12,000 of them I think (and the same for nearby restaurants). e.g. https://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 Each of these pages list the nearby hotels to that concert venue. Users clicking on the individual hotel are brought through to a hotel (product) page e.g. https://www.concerthotels.com/hotel/the-new-yorker-a-wyndham-hotel/136818 I made a decision years ago to noindex all of the /hotel/ pages since they don't have a huge amount of unique content and aren't the pages I'd like my users to land on . The primary pages on my site are the /venue-hotels/ listing pages. I have similar pages for nearby restaurants, so there are approximately 12,000 venue-restaurants pages, again, one listing page for each concert venue. However, while all of these pages are potentially money-earners, in reality, the vast majority of subsequent hotel bookings have come from a fraction of the 12,000 venues. I would say 2000 venues are key money earning pages, a further 6000 have generated income of a low level, and 4000 are yet to generate income. I have a few related questions: Although there is potential for any of these pages to generate revenue, should I be brutal and simply delete a venue if it hasn't generated revenue within a time period, and just accept that, while it "could" be useful, it hasn't proven to be and isn't worth the link equity. Or should I noindex these "poorly performing pages"? Should all 12,000 pages be listed in my XML sitemap? Or simply the ones that are generating revenue, or perhaps just the ones that have generated significant revenue in the past and have proved to be most important to my business? Thanks Mike
Technical SEO | | mjk260 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
No existing pages in Google index
I have a real estate portal. I have a few categories - for example: flats, houses etc. Url of category looks like that: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1 Each category has about 30-40 pages - BUT in Google index I found url like: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1350 Can you explain it? This url contains just headline etc - but no content! (it´s just generated page by PHP) How is it possible, that Google can find and index these pages? (on the web, there are no backlinks on these pages) thanks
Technical SEO | | visibilitysk0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Duplicate index.php/webpage pages on website. Help needed!
Hi Guys, Having a really frustrating problem with our website. It is a Joomla 1.7 site and we have some duplicate page issues. What is happening is that we have a webpage, lets say domain.com/webpage1 and then we also have domain.com/index.php/webpage1. Google is seeing these as duplicate pages and is causing me some real SEO problems. I have tried setting up a 301 redirect but it wn't let me redirect /index.php/webpage1 to /webpage1. Anyone have any ideas or plugins that can be used to sort this out? Any help will be really appreciated! Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewBarby0 -
Wrong page version in the index
Hi, my site is currently accessible through URL with and without www. The Version with www has 10 times more Backlinks (PA 45 vs 38) but is not listet into the google Index. As far as I know there was never made a google Webmaster account or declared otherwise the version without www to be 'cannonical'. Basically I think that for SEO reasons it would be much better to declare the with www version to be cannonical and redirect the without www version to it. My questions are: Do you have an idea why the with www version is not indexed?
Technical SEO | | Naturalmente
How long does Google usually take to change the version in the index?
Do I risk my site to be thrown out of the index for some days untill the change is made? Thanks in advance.0 -
How long does it take for Google to de-index urls?
Added the noindex meta tag to some pages on my site and I am wondering if anyone has any idea how long it will take to deindex the urls?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0