Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
-
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL.Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website?
I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.
-
besides my comment below the other issue I am facing is that I have several neighborhoods I would like to rank for within a region. Does this mean best idea is to get rid of these neighborhood pages (via noindex or other solution) and just focus on the region, until I am able to add unique content to the neighborhood pages?
-
rel=canonical may be difficult because each page has several pages, like:
example.com/region-name, example.com/region-name-2, example.com/region-name-3 etc
example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name, example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name-2 etcI do NOT have a "view all" page. Page 3 on the neighborhood page may include 30% of data found on page 3 of region page etc.
So what to be done?
-
So you exactly have an idea that you can work around with the MLS pages to make them more unique which in my opinion is the ideal choice so let’s move to the real question.
I don’t think no-follow is a bad option but if I would be at your places I would have used rel canonical instead of no follow.
Rel canonical simply tells search engine out of the two identical (or almost identical) page which one is the preferred version of the URL.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Publishing pages with thin content, update later?
So I have about 285 pages I created with very, very thin content on each. Each is unique, and each serves its own purpose. My question is, do you guys think it is wise to publish all of these at once to just get them out there and update each as we go along? Each page is very laser targeted and I anticipate that a large handful will actually rank soon after publishing. Thanks! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBinga11250 -
Unique Content Below Fold - Better Move Above Fold?
I have a page with a Google Map taking up 80% of space above the fold (rest is content which is not unique to my site) and all unique written content and copyrighted pictures are from a visual stand point right below the fold. I am considering making the Google map 1/4 in size so I can get my unique content up higher. Questions: Do we have any evidence or sound reasoning why I should / should not make this move? Is the content really considered below the fold or will Google see that it is simply a large map I have on the site and therefore will actually consider the content to be above the fold? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Fix broken external links on noindex, follow pages no one visits?
Would you take the time to fix external links on your site on pages that are noindex, follow on pages that no one ever visits? The only reason to do it would be to present a tidier site to Google, but would it really care if those pages are noindex/folllow? The thing that makes it a non-trivial amount of work is that there are hundreds of these on a large site. Do you think Google cares, if they're noindex/follow? I know the safe answer is always fix everything, but really it has to get weighed against the likely benefit and other projects with a limited amount of time to work with. Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Differences between "casas rusticas" and "casas rústicas"
Hi All, I've a client with this website: http://www.e-rustica.com/casas-rusticas It's a spanish realtor for special houses (rustic). We wanto it to be good posited as "casas rústicas" that it's the correct keyword and asl "casas rusticas" that it's like lot of people write it. Do you know if google see this two keywords as the same? Even we've done SEO for "casas rústicas" it's much better posited for "casas rusticas". Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbenzo_aficiona0 -
Dealing with Redirects and iFrames - getting "product login" pages to rank
One of our most popular products has a very authoritative product page, which is great for marketing purposes, but not so much for current users. When current users search for "product x login" or "product x sign in", instead of getting to the login page, they see the product page - it adds a couple of clicks to their experience, which is not what we want. One of the problems is that the actual login page has barely any content, and the content that it does carry is wrapped around <iframes>. Due to political and security reasons, the web team is reluctant to make any changes to the page, and one of their arguments is that the login page actually ranks #1 for a few other products (at our company, the majority of logins originate from the same domain). </iframes> To add to the challenge - queries that do return the login page as #1 result (for some of our other products) actually do not reference the sign-in domain, but our old domain, which is now a 301 redirect to the sign-in domain. To make that clear - **Google is displaying the origin domain in SERPs, instead of displaying the destination domain. ** The question is - how do we get this popular product's login page to rank higher than the product page for "login" / "sign in" queries? I'm not even sure where we should point links to at this point - the actual sign in domain or the origin domain? I have the redirect chains and domain authority for all of the pages involved, including a few of our major competitors (who follow the same login format), and will be happy to share it privately with a Moz expert. I'd prefer not to make any more information publicly available, so please reach out via private message if you think you can help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leosaraceni0 -
Hreflang="x-default"
Hello all This is my first question in the Moz Forum, hope I will get some concrete answers 🙂 I am looking for some suggestions on implementing the hreflang="x-default" properly in our site. Any previous experience or a link to a specific resource/ example will be very helpful. I have found many examples on implementing the homepage hreflang, however nothing on non-homepage urls within your site. The below will be the code for the "Homepage" for /uk/. Here /en-INT/ is a Global English site not targeted for any country unlike en-MY, en-SG, en-AU etc. Is this the correct approach? Now, in case of non homepage urls, should the respective en-INT url be "x-default" or the "x-default" shouldn't exist altogether? For example, will the below be the correct coding? Many thanks Avi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Delonghi_Group0 -
Trailing slash and rel="canonical"
Our website is in a directory format: http://www.website.com/website.asp Our homepage display URL is http://www.website.com which currently matches our to eliminate the possibility of duplicate content. However, I noticed that in the SERPs, google displays the homepage with a trailing slash http://www.website.com/ My question: should I change the rel="canonical" to have a trailing slash? I noticed one of our competitors uses the trailing slash in their rel="canonical" Do potential benefits outweigh the risks? I can PM further information if necessary. Thanks for the assistance in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Does "Noindex" lead to Loss of Link Equity?
Our company has two websites with about 8,000 duplicate articles between them. Yep, 8,000 articles were posted on both sites over the past few years. This is the definition of cross-domain duplicate content. Plan A is to set all of the articles to "noindex,follow" on the site that we care less about (site B). We are not redirecting since we want to keep the content on that site for on-site traffic to discover. If we do set them to "noindex," my concern is that we'll lose massive amounts of link equity acquired over time...and thus lose domain authority...thus overall site rankability. Does Google treat pages changed to "noindex" the same as 404 pages? If so, then I imagine we would lose massive link equity. Plan B is to just wait it out since we're migrating site B to site A in 6-9 months, and hope that our more important site (site A) doesn't get a Panda penalty in the meantime. Thoughts on the better plan?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0