Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
-
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept?
If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag?
If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
-
Sometimes you need to leave the crawl path open to Googlebot so they can get around the site. A specific example that may be relevant to you is in pagination. If you have 100 products and are only showing 10 on the first page Google will not be able to reach the other 90 product pages as easily if you block paginated pages in the robots.txt. Better options in such a case might be a robots noindex,follow meta tag, rel next/prev tags, or a "view all" canonical page.
If these pages aren't important to the crawlability of the site, such as internal search results, you could block them in the robots.txt file with little or no issues, and it would help to get them out of the index. If they aren't useful for spiders or users, or anything else, then yes you can and should probably let them 404, rather than blocking.
Yes, I do like to leave the blocked or removed URLs in the sitemap for just a little while to ensure Googlebog revisits them and sees the noindex tag, 404 error code, 301 redirect, or whatever it is they need to see in order to update their index. They'll get there on their own eventually, but I find it faster to send them to the pages myself. Once Googlebot visits these URls and updates their index you should remove them from your sitemaps.
-
If you want to noindex any of your pages, there is no way that Google or any other search engines will think something is fishy. Its up to the webmaster to decide what and what not to get indexed from his website. If you implement page level noindex, the link juice will still flow to the page but if you also have nofollow along with noindex, the link juice will flow to the page but will be contained on the page itself and will not be passed on the links that flow out of that page.
I conclude by saying, there is nothing wrong in making the pages non-indexable.
Here is an interesting discussion related to this on Moz:
http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice
Hope it helps.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Devanur,
What I am asking is if the robots/google will view it as a negative thing for noindexing pages and still trying to pass the link juice, even though the pages aren't even viewable to the front end user.
-
If you wish not to show these pages even to the front end user, you can just block them using the page level robots meta tag so that these pages will never be indexed by the search engines as well.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Yes, but what if these pages aren't even viewable to the front end user?
-
Hi there, it is a very good idea to block any and all the pages that do not provide any useful content to the visitors and especially when they are very thin content wise. So the idea is to keep away low quality content that does no good to the visitor, from the Internet. Search engines would love every webmaster doing so.
However, sometimes, no matter how thin the content is on some pages, they still provide good information to the visitors and serve the purpose of the visit. In this case, you can provide contextual links to those pages and add the nofollow attribute to the link. Of course you should ideally be implementing the page level blocking using the robots meta tag on those pages. I do not think you should return a 404 on these pages as there is no need to do so. When a page level blocking is implemented, Google will not index the blocked content even if it finds a third party reference to it from elsewhere on the Internet.
If you have implemented the page level noindex using the robots meta tag, there is no need to go for a sitemap with these URLs. With noindex in place, as I mentioned above, Google will not index the content even if it discovers the page using a reference from anywhere on the Internet.
Hope it helps my friend.Best,Devanur Rafi
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
-
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Aug 9, 2018, 8:29 AM | Boodreaux0 -
Duplicate product content - from a manufacturer website, to retailers
Hi Mozzers, We're working on a website for a manufacturer who allows retailers to reuse their product information. Now, this of course raises the issue of duplicate content. The manufacturer is the content owner and originator, but retailers will copy the information for their own site and not link back (permitted by the manufacturer) - the only reference to the manufacturer will be the brand name citation on the retailer website. How would you deal with the duplicate content issues that this may cause. Especially considering the domain authority for a lot of the retailer websites is better than the manufacturer site? Thanks!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Feb 21, 2016, 10:29 PM | A_Q0 -
Should I submit a sitemap for a site with dynamic pages?
I have a coupon website (http://couponeasy.com)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Oct 15, 2015, 9:54 PM | shopperlocal_DM
Being a coupon website, my content is always keeps changing (as new coupons are added and expired deals are removed) automatically. I wish to create a sitemap but I realised that there is not much point in creating a sitemap for all pages as they will be removed sooner or later and/or are canonical. I have about 8-9 pages which are static and hence I can include them in sitemap. Now the question is.... If I create the sitemap for these 9 pages and submit it to google webmaster, will the google crawlers stop indexing other pages? NOTE: I need to create the sitemap for getting expanded sitelinks. http://couponeasy.com/0 -
Best Location to find High Page Authority/ Domain Authority Expired Domains?
Hi, I've been looking online for the best locations to purchase expired domains with existing Page Authority/ Domain Authority attached to them. So far I've found: http://www.expireddomains.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Feb 13, 2021, 6:36 AM | VelasquezEF
http://www.domainauthoritylinks.com
http://moonsy.com/expired_domains/ These site's are great but I'm wondering if I'm potentially missing other locations? Any other recommendations? Thanks.1 -
Pages linked with Spam been 301 redirected to 404\. Is it ok
Pl suggest, some pages having some spam links pointed to those pages are been redirected to 404 error page (through 301 redirect) - as removing them manually was not possible due to part of core component of cms and many other coding issue, the only way as advised by developer was making 301 redirect to 404 page. Does by redirecting these pages to 404 page using 301 redirect, will nullify all negative or spam links pointing to them and eventually will remove the resulting spam impact on the site too. Many Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Nov 11, 2014, 8:55 PM | Modi0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Mar 27, 2013, 2:47 PM | CaseyDaline0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Feb 21, 2013, 4:45 PM | DROIDSTERS0 -
Can a Page Title be all UPPER CASE?
My clients wants to use UPPER CASE for all his page titles. Is this okay? Does Google react badly to this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jun 14, 2012, 5:58 AM | petewinter0