Medium sizes forum with 1000's of thin content gallery pages. Disallow or noindex?
-
I have a forum at http://www.onedirection.net/forums/ which contains a gallery with 1000's of very thin-content pages. We've currently got these photo pages disallowed from the main googlebot via robots.txt, but we do all the Google images crawler access.
Now I've been reading that we shouldn't really use disallow, and instead should add a noindex tag on the page itself.
It's a little awkward to edit the source of the gallery pages (and keeping any amends the next time the forum software gets updated).
Whats the best way of handling this?
Chris.
-
Hey Chris,
I agree that your current implementation, while not ideal, is perfectly adequate for the purposes of ensuring you don't have duplicate content or cannibalisation problems - but still allows Google to index the UCG images.
You're also preventing Googlebot from seeing the user profile pages, which is a good idea, since many of them are very thin and mostly duplicate.
So, from a pure SEO perspective, I think you've done a good job.
However... I think you should also consider the ethical implications of potentially blocking the image googlebot as well. By preventing Google from indexing all those images of young girls fawning over the vacuous runners up of a televised talent show, you would undoubtedly be doing the world a great service.
-
Hi Chris, I second Jarno's opinion in this regard. If it is going to be a huge overhead to add the page level blocking, you can rely on your current robots.txt setup. There is a small catch here though. Even if you block using robots.txt file, if Google finds a reference to the blocked content elsewhere on the Internet, then it would index the blocked content. In situations like this, page level content blocking is the way forward. So to fully restrict Google bot indexing your content, you should ideally be using the page level robots meta tag or x-robots-tag.
Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en
Hope it helps.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Chris,
is the disallow meta update is too complicated for you to add due to software issues etc. then I feel that your current method is the right way to go. Normally you would be absolutely right for the simple reason that page level overrules the robots.txt. But if a software update overrules the rules places in your code then you have to manually add it after each and every update and i'm not sure you want to do that.
regards
Jarno
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
-
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Bigcommerce only allows us to have https for our store only, not the other pages on our site, so we have a mix of https and http, how is this hurting us and what's the best way to fix?
So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Gallery Causing Duplicate Content Issues
Hi! I have a gallery on my website. When you click to view the next image it goes to a new page but the content is exactly the same as the first page. This is flagging up a duplicate content issue. What is the best way to fix this? Add a canonical tag to page 2,3,4 or add a noindex tag? I have found a lot of conflicting answers. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | emma19860 -
Looking at creating some auto-generated pages - duplicate content?
Hi Everyone! We just launched a new version of our research site and the main CTA on the page sends users to a subdomain that's blocked by robots.txt. The subdomain link is one of our PPC landing pages and they would be duplicate content for every model (cars). We're also looking at a new content stream of deals pages, on the main domain. The thought process was that we could rank these pages for things like "Volkswagen golf deals" and also use them as canonical URLs from the PPC pages so that Panda doesn't get mad at us for sending hundreds of links to a subdomain that's blocked. It's going to take us a lot of time to write the copy for the deals pages, so if we auto-generate it by pulling a paragraph of copy from the car review, and numerical stats about that model, will it be classes as duplicate and/or is there any downside to doing it? Review Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/car-reviews/Ford/Fiesta Deals Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/deals/Ford/Fiesta PPC Landing Page: http://quotes.carwow.co.uk/buy/Ford/Fiesta I can't help but feel that this may all be a bit overkill and perhaps it makes more sense to build 1 central deals page per model with unique content that we can also send the PPC traffic to, then life any block from the quotes. subdomain. But that will take time and we'd also like a quick solution. I'd also question if it's even an issue to link to a blocked subdomain, Google adds the quote URL into the index but can't crawl it, which I've been told is bad - but is it bad enough to do something about? Thanks, JP
Technical SEO | | Matt.Carwow0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Why does SEOMos Pro include noindex pages?
I'm new to SEOMoz. Been digesting the crawl data and have a tonne of action items that we'll be executing on fairly soon. Love it! One thing I noticed is in some of crawl warnings include pages that expressly have the ROBOTS meta tag with the "noindex" value. Example: many of my noindex pages don't include meta descriptions. Therefore, is it safe to ignore warnings of this nature for these pages?
Technical SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Does removing product listings help raise SERP's on other pages?
Does removing content ever make sense? We have out of stock products that are left on the site (in an out of stock section) specifically for SEO value, but I am not sure how to approach the problem from a bottom line conversion stand point. Do we leave out of stock products and hope that they turn into a conversion rate via cross selling, or do out of stock products lower the value of other pages by "stealing" link juice and pagerank from the rest of the site? (and effectively driving interest away) What is your perspective? Do you believe that any content that is related or semi-related to your main focus is beneficial, or does it only make sense to have strong content that has a higher rate of conversion and overall site engagement?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30