Noindex large productpages on webshop to counter Panda
-
A Dutch webshop with 10.000 productpages is experiencing lower rankings and indexation. Problems started last october, a little while after the panda and penguin update.
One of the problems diagnosed is the lack of unique content. Many of the productpages lack a description and some are variants of eachother. (color, size, etc). So a solution could be to write unique descriptions and use rel canonical to concentrate color/size variations to one productpage.
There is however no capacity to do this on short notice. So now I'm wondering if the following is effective.
Exclude all productpages via noindex, robots.txt. IN the same way as you can do with search pages. The only pages left for indexation are homepage and 200-300 categorypages. We then write unique content and work on the ranking of the categorypages. When this works the product pages are rewritten and slowly reincluded, category by category.
My worry is the loss of ranking for productpages. ALthoug the ranking is minimal currently. My second worry is the high amount of links on category pages that lead to produtpages that will be excluded rom google. Thirdly, I am wondering if this works at all. using noindex on 10.000 productpages consumes crawl budget and dillutes the internal link structure.
What do you think?
-
I see. There's a pretty thorough discussion on a very similar situation here: http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-use-nofollow-tag-on-product-page-duplicated-content. Everett endorsed Monica's answer with, "... you might consider putting a Robots Noindex,Follow meta tag on the product pages. You'll need to rely on category pages for rankings in that case, which makes sense for a site like this." Monica's long term solution was to also work on getting specific user-generated content on as many product pages as possible. Cheers!
-
@Ryan, thx for your answer. The pagerank flow is indeed one of the things I worry about when deindexing large parts of the site. Especcialy since the category pages will be full of internal links to productpages that are excluded from indexation by robots.txt or robots meta.
The problem I am trying to solve however has nothing to do with pagerank sculpting. I suspect an algorithmic drop due to thin, duplicate and syndicated content. The drop is sitewide. Assuming that the drop is due to panda I suspect the percentage of low quality pages should be optimized. Would outlinking and better DA really be sufficient to counter a suspected Panda problem? Or is it required to make the 10.000 product pages of better quality, I would think the latter. Since there is no budget to do so I wonder if it is possible to drop these low quality pages from the index (but keep them in the website). Would this strenghten the remaining pages to bounce back up, assuming these remaining pages are of good quality offcourse.
Since SEO is not the only factor to be taken into account I'd rather not delete these pages from the website.
-
Matt Cutts speaks to part of what you're thinking about doing here: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ and it's important to note that it's not nearly as effective. The thing I would focus more on is the DA and quality of referrals to your site. Secondly, linking out from pages is actually a positive strength indicator when done in the right way, per Cutts in the same article, "In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites." Perhaps your product pages could be strengthened further by this as well.
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
-
Extreme high number of pages found on webshop
Hi, Im working for the first time on a magento webshop. But i run into a problem where crawlers find then thousands of pages while there are a few hunderd products. I expect is has something to do with filters that generate dynamic URL's. I can't find any setting in Magento to prevent this and i think this will hurt SEO performance because of duplicate content and high amount of pages that need to be crawled while the site has no authority. What would my approach be to solve this? Do i need to ad certain tags to the pages or are these settings in my robots file.
Technical SEO | | J05B0 -
Nofollow/Noindex Category Listing Pages with Filters
Our e-commerce site currently has thousands of duplicate pages indexed because category listing pages with all the different filters selected are indexed. So, for example, you would see indexed: example.com/boots example.com/boots/black example.com/boots/black-size-small etc. There is a logic in place that when more than one filter is selected all the links on the page are nofollowed, but Googlebot is still getting to them, and the variations are being indexed. At this point I'd like to add 'noindex' or canonical tags to the filtered versions of the category pages, but many of these filtered pages are driving traffic. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | fayfr0 -
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rignite0 -
Sitemap & noindex inconstancy?
Hey Moz Community! On a the CMS in question the sitemap and robots file is locked down. Can't be edited or modified what so ever. If I noindex a page in the But it is still on the xml sitemap... Will it get indexed? Thoughts, comments and experience greatly appreciate and welcome.
Technical SEO | | paul-bold0 -
Thesis Theme (Nofollow, noindex) Problem
Hi, Im using Thesis theme for one of my wordpress website, for some reason, some of my pages are 'noindex" and 'nofollow" even though i have these boxes unchecked Does anybody know the solution to that? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KentR0 -
301 Redirects on Large Real Estate Website
Hi guys,We are about to move over to a new website and need advice on handling the 301 redirects.We have a large real estate website with around 12,000 pages, a lot of these are properties (about 10,000)On our old website, the url structure for each property is as follows -domainname.com/property/view?property=14863on our new site, the url structure isdomainname.com/properties/view/6137The property ID number is always different from old site to new. The way we see it, we have two options. a.) a manual redirect of each and every property url. A very very long jobb.) a folder level redirect, so redirect the 'property' folder on the old site into the 'properties' folder on new. The con with this one is we are not sure if this is the best route to take, if it is how we would go about it?Some advice would be really appreciated guys. I know there are some hyper intelligent SEO's in here and we need to make sure we handle this right!Many thanks in advance.Mark
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
Hi, The following GWT screen tells a bit of the story: site: http://bit.ly/mrgdD0 http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp On about Feb 8 I decided to fix a large number of 'duplicate title' warnings being reported in GWT "HTML Suggestions" -- these were for URLs which differed only in parameter case, and which had Canonical tags, but were still reported as dups in GWT. My traffic had been steady at about 1000 clicks/day. At midnight on 2/10, google traffic completely halted, down to 11 clicks/day. I submitted a recon request and was told 'no manual penalty' Also, the 'sitemap' indexes in GWT showed 'pending' for 24x7 starting then. By about the 18th, the 'duplicate titles' count dropped to about 600 or so... the next day traffic hopped right back to about 800 clicks/day - for a week - then stopped again, down to 10/day, a week later, on the 26th. I then noticed that GWT was reporting 20K page-not found errors - this has now grown to 35K such errors! I realized that bogus internal links were being generated as I failed to disable the PHP warning messages.... so I disabled PHP warnings and fixed what I thought was the source of the errors. However, the not-found count continues to climb -- and I don't know where these bad internal links are coming from, because the GWT report lists these link sources as 'unavailable'. I'v been through a similar problem last year and it took months (4) for google to digest all the bogus pages ad recover. If I have to wait that long again I will lose much $$. Assuming that the large number of 404 internal errors is the reason for the sudden shutoff... How can I a) verify the source of these internal links, given that google says the source pages are 'unavailable'.. Most critically, how can I do a 'RESET" and have google re-spider my site -- or block the signature of these URLs in order to get rid of these errors ASAP?? thanks
Technical SEO | | mantucket0 -
Best way to setup large site for multi language
Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | DavidLenehan0