Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
-
Hello,
I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages.
Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow".
At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages.
Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter?
Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome.
Thank you!
Fabrizio
-
Julian, we sell digital sheet music and the additional 100,000 are products from Alfred music publishing company. Of course they will not be "high quality pages", but they are product pages, each one offering a piece of music. We are an e-commerce website, how can we avoid having product pages?! But of course, as Wesley said above, we can improve each product page quality content by giving more/custom information for each product, increasing user reviews, etc.
Other suggestions?
-
Thank you Wesley, yes, I think you are right. Our business is suffering really too much without traffic coming from the "noindex" pages, and after many months we still don't see recovery. I think the best approach would be probably to keep the pages in the index and differentiate them as much as we can.
Thank you!
-
Panda is probably the worst penalty to have. Very few site ever recover, even though site owner have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to solve it. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491
In this video, about 12.43 - matt cutts is clear, if you think its low quality 404 it, in other delete it.
May I ask why you want to keep these 180,000 pages live? And why are you planning to add another 100,000 pages? Surely they cant be high quality pages?
-
Fabrizo, as far as I know Google Panda is now part of the standard Google algorithm and it won't be a periodic event anymore. Penguin still is though.
If your product pages are duplicate content according to Google try and see if you can do something about that instead of no-indexing it. Is there no way you can update the products so they display a more prominent description? I understand that manually it's not a possibility because there are way too much products for that to be an option.
I did notice that on a lot of your product pages you have a standard text: "This item includes: PDF (digital sheet music to print), Scorch files (for online playing, transposition and printing), Videos, MIDI and Mp3 audio files (including <a title="This item includes Mp3 music accompaniment files.">Mp3 music accompaniment files</a>)*
Genre: classical
Skill Level: medium"Since this is basicly the only text on a lot of pages I think it's a big part of the problem. Maybe you can change this text so it looks different for every product?
Try tools like http://www.plagspotter.com/ to find the duplicate content and see which solution is best for your specific problem.
I hope i helped and if you need more help let me know
-
I understand what you mean and I agree with you in general, but specifically to our own website, I have no idea who put that link on that page, which is by the way a "nofollow" link. We never built links, all our incoming links are either natural and/or links from our own affiliates. I don't see much of "that stuff" on our back-link profile... am I in error?
Anyhow, yes, we are aware the situation is quite complex. Thank you again.
-
I actually looked at the competitors ranking #3 and #4 for the phrase "download sheet music" since your ranking 5th. Either way, its not a matter of too much or too little. It's how much of the link profile is authentic vs how much is made up of stuff like this....
http://www.dionneco.com/2011/02/love-is-a-parallax/
that's what I meant by fake links.
I think what you may be missing is how complex the situation really is. There's a lot more to be considered than a number in Open Site Explorer - which is actually only a portions of what's really out there.
You may also want to look at changes you can make on-site. I'm a firm believer that proper HTML, accessibility, UX and all that really matter.
-
Thank you Takeshi, I think you got the problem right. The "crawling" side of the issue is something I was thinking about too!
We are actually working on every aspect of our website to improve its content because we have suffered by Panda a lot in the past two years, so here is the strategy we begun to take since March:
1. "noindexing" most of our thin or almost-duplicate content to get it removed from the index
2. Improve our best content and differentiate it as much as we can with compelling content (this takes a long time!)
3. Consolidating similar pages with the use of canonical tags.
In order to tackle the "slower crawling" problem you have highlighted here, do you think that would be probably better for us to stop engines to crawl those pages altogether via robots.txt once they have been removed? Would that solve the crawl issue? I could do that at least with these new 100,000 new product pages we plan to add!
Thank you!
-
Wesley, that's because of being penalized by Panda several times in the past... so we are trying the "clean-up" strategy with the hope to be "de-penalized" by Panda at the next related algorithm update. Looks like we had too many "thin" or "almost duplicate" pages... that's why we removed so many pages from the index! But if we don't see improvements in the coming 1-2 months, I guess we'll put the product pages in the index because our business is suffering a big deal!
-
Colin, what do you mean with "fake links" exactly? Our link profile looks actually in better shape than our main competitors:
virtualsheetmusic.com (our site): links: 614,013 root domains: 2,233
sheetmusicplus.com (competitor): links: 5,322,596 root domains: 6,149 (worse than our profile!)
musicnotes.com (competitor): links: 6,527,429 root domains: 2,914 (much worse than our profile!)
Am I missing anything?
-
The discrepancy between noindexed/indexed pages is not in itself a problem. However having all those pages will present a challenge to Google, in terms of crawling. Even though the pages won't be indexed, Google will need to spend some of your limited crawl budget crawling all those pages.
Also, to recover from Panda it's necessary to not only noindex duplicate content, but improve your indexed content. That means things like consolidating similar pages into one page, writing unique content for your pages, and getting unique user-generated content such as reviews.
-
Why would you want to no-index your product pages? They seem like the kind of pages you want to get found on.
There shouldn't be a problem between the amount of index pages VS no-index pages except you won't get found on the no-index ones. Product pages tend to be the kind of pages that you REALLY want to get found on.
I think you should rethink your strategy to recover from the penalties.
Try to find out where exactly the penalties came from and fix the errors in that area of our website. -
Can't say I've been in that situation, but search engines seem to interpret that tag as an on/off situation. and I think you probably know that your problems aren't related to or able to be solved by robots meta tags.
You need less fake links. OSE finds well over half a million links from 3K root domains to your site. Look at your competitors - a few thousand links from a handful of domains.
It's a shame because it seems like the internet wanted to make you the authority naturally - You've got a handful of really solid links coming in. If you could shed the spam somehow you'd be doing a lot better.
So yea, stating the obvious, I know. best of luck to you and hope the site recovers!
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
-
Too many on page links
Hi I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+ How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
When does Google index a fetched page?
I have seen where it will index on of my pages within 5 minutes of fetching, but have also read that it can take a day. I'm on day #2 and it appears that it has still not re-indexed 15 pages that I fetched. I changed the meta-description in all of them, and added content to nearly all of them, but none of those changes are showing when I do a site:www.site/page I'm trying to test changes in this manner, so it is important for me to know WHEN a fetched page has been indexed, or at least IF it has. How can I tell what is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
DAs dropped for many pages?
I recently noticed that the domain authorities dropped by 5 or 6 points for us and for our competitors. And for many other pages that I check regularly. Was the algorithm changed or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them). I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether. It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google. How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Google indexing "noindex" pages
1 weeks ago my website expanded with a lot more pages. I included "noindex, follow" on a lot of these new pages, but then 4 days ago I saw the nr of pages Google indexed increased. Should I expect in 2-3 weeks these pages will be properly noindexed and it may just be a delay? It is odd to me that a few days after including "noindex" on pages, that webmaster tools shows an increase in indexing - that the pages were indexed in other words. My website is relatively new and these new pages are not pages Google frequently indexes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How to avoid too many "On Page Links"?
Hi everyone I don't seem to be able to keep big G off my back, even though I do not engage in any black hat or excessive optimization practices. Due to another unpleasant heavy SERP "fluctuation" I am in investigation mode yet again and want to take a closer look at one of the warnings within the SEOmoz dashboard, which is "Too many on page links". Looking at my statistics this is clearly the case. I wonder how you can even avoid that at times. I have a lot of information on my homepage that links out to subpages. I get the feeling that even the links within the roll-over menus (or dropdown) are counted. Of course, in that case then you will end up with a crazy amount of on page links. What about blog-like news entries on your homepage that link to other pages as well? And not to forget the links that result from the tags underneath a post? What am I trying to get at? Well, do you feel that a bad website template may cause this issue i.e. are the links from roll-over menus counted as links on the homepage even though they are not directly visible? I am not sure how to cut down on the issue as the sidebar modules are present on every page and thus up the links count wherever you are on the site. On another note, I've seen plenty of homepages with excessive information and links going out, would they be suffering from the search engines' hammer too? How do you manage the too many on page links issue? Many thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0