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.
What to do with temporary empty pages?
-
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a
and some footer text.
I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000.
So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is?
Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
-
I think that populating the pages with "old listings" is a great example of what I could do. I could say "No current listings, but these are the last 10 listings that was sold in this area".
Thanks for your input.
-
Correct. It would pass pagerank but Google would also remove the pages from index.
Can you populate the locations with no current listings with random listings from surrounding locations? Or leave older listings live on the page under a heading "Recently Sold" - or something similar?
If you want to overcome duplicate issues and keep the pages indexed, you will need to populate the pages with some sort of unique content you or are going to keep getting these issues.
-
And the reason you would chose this over 404 is to be able to pass pagerank? That's the only benefit? This would still make Google remove the page from the index right?
-
Hi Marcus,
You could add canonical tags on the location pages that have no listings and point them to a top level region or another close-by location that does have listings.
The canonical tag will pass on any authority that each location page has and overcome the duplicate content issues that you are seeing.
I imagine that this would be a nightmare job if it had to be done manually, so hopefully you (or your developer) can set a rule that if there are no listings in a location it automatically points a canonical tag to another relevant page.
Another option would be to "noindex" location pages with no listings. This will solve the duplicate issues but won't pass on any authority the location pages might have.
Cheers
-
Anyone have any further suggestion for this? Or any input if it is a good idea to put 404 on a page when its empty, that is probably going to be changed to 200 OK later when it gets content on it?
-
Maybe I should have explained why I was uncertain about it.
Isn't it weird to have a site be 404 and 200 every other week or month and keep changing like that? To me a 404 is a page that is "definitely not here" or "permanently removed". Basically telling Google and visitors "There is nothing here now and there won't be anything here later".
If I set it to a 404 every time the page is empty, and lets say it is empty 6 months out of 12 months of the year. Won't Google remove my page from their index completely?
To me it is the first solution that comes up in my head, thats why I mention it. But at the same time it does not really seem like a way to tell Google that the page is "temporary empty, but might have content in the future".
-
Hi Marcus, Your proposed idea is good: 404 in case there are no houses for sales and a 200 if there are.
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
-
Page Indexing without content
Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?
Technical SEO | May 25, 2024, 4:39 AM | AtuliSulava1 -
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | Jun 13, 2019, 1:23 AM | AL123al0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | Feb 10, 2015, 1:44 PM | Pete40 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | Nov 21, 2014, 6:47 PM | vivekrathore0 -
Why google indexed pages are decreasing?
Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that? will it effect my web page ranking ?
Technical SEO | Jun 19, 2014, 11:28 PM | SierraPCB0 -
Low page impressions
Hey there MOZ Geniuses; While checking my webmaster data I noticed that almost all my Google impressions are generated by the home page, most other content pages are showing virtually no impression data <50 (the home page is showing around 1500 - a couple of the pages are in the 150-200 range). the site has been up for about 8 months now. Traffic on average is about 500 visitors, but I'm seeing very little entry other then the home page. Checking the number Sitemap section 27 of 30 are index Webmaster tools are not reporting errors Webmaster keyword impressions are also extremely low 164 keywords with the highest impression count of 79 and dropping from there. MOZ is show very few minor issues although it says that it crawled 10k pages? -- we only have 30 or so. The answer seems obvious, Google is not showing my content ... the question is why and what steps can I take to analyze this? Could there be a possibility of some type of penalty? I welcome all your suggestions: The site is www.calibersi.com
Technical SEO | Feb 28, 2014, 6:02 PM | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | Oct 8, 2013, 6:01 PM | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | Sep 18, 2012, 7:32 PM | TOMMarketingLtd.0