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.
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
-
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great.
I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
-
trung.ngo - check out this article I posted http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
that's where I got my "inspiration" from to consider using robots.txt instead...
-
I am thinking if I exclude more thin pages from being crawled (robots.txt) that may be better than my current "noindex, follow" - the thin pages are already "noindex, follow".
You are saying "unless there's evidence that the pages are taking up too much of the crawl bandwidth, it doesn't seem like too much of an issue to me." - but how would I know this? Fair to assume for a website with 5,000 pages this is probably not an issue?
I am concerned with the "noindex, follow" Google may think "ahh, we have seen all this stuff before. Thanks for keeping out of our index, but we are still going to devalue your original content indexed pages because we crawl and see all this thin stuff." I am thinking with the robots.txt it would potentially be a stronger signal that could help my indexed pages. Or you think it is a minor and probably not relevant?
-
Hello there,
Have you had any duplicate content or crawling issues in the past or is this more of a preventative measure? If the pages, as you put it, "would not generate relevant search traffic", then I would argue that it'd make sense to "noindex, follow" based on the assumption that the pages are not currently driving search traffic, and have no real potential to contribute significantly to brand discovery via a search engine in the future.
I wouldn't necessarily say that Google crawling your page more frequently would automatically give you a boost in rankings; it's more associated with whether or not they're crawling pages frequently enough to index updates to the pages. So unless there's evidence that the pages are taking up too much of the crawl bandwidth, it doesn't seem like too much of an issue to me.
All of this to say, take a look at the data to see if a real problem exists--whether crawl resources or duplicate content--before doing anything drastic. And, of course, also understand what you'll be losing by making the updates. If you do choose to prevent crawling via robots.txt and are at all concerned with the duplicate/thin content aspect, remember to implement a noindex and confirm that the pages are removed from search results before disallowing in robots.txt--otherwise, they'll remain indexed.
-
Hi Keri, There are some good comments but none really answer this question and that is why I am trying to approach from different angles. Maybe you can shed some light on this:
AJ Kohn wrote this great article: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization - he talks about using robots.txt to exclude thin content in order to increase frequency with qhich indexed content gets crawled, supposedly helping rankings. In this great whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests using "noindex, follow" - http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls.I am trying to get more light on this (people who have experience with this), but struggle to get answers.
-
I noticed you had similar questions at http://moz.com/community/q/unique-content-below-fold-better-move-above-fold and http://moz.com/community/q/risk-using-nofollow-tag with several answers each, including some that were marked as Good Answer. Did any of those answers help to answer your question?
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
-
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Are HTML Sitemaps Still Effective With "Noindex, Follow"?
A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages. To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index. Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner0 -
Why is "Noindex" better than a "Canonical" for Pagination?
"Noindex" is a suggested pagination technique here: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284, and everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page, but I'd love if someone can explain why "noindex" is better than a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Is it a bad idea to have a "press" page and link to press mentions of our company?
We've recently been getting quite a bit of press. Would it be wise to create a "press" page and link to mentions of us or would this devalue the links on the press pages as Google may think they reciprocal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JenniferDacosta0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0