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.
Sanity Check: NoIndexing a Boatload of URLs
-
Hi,
I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content.
My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages.
The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep.
Here are my questions:
-
Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time.
-
Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time?
-
Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of?
-
Any additional ideas?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
-
Hi Michael
The problem you have is the very low value content that exists on all of those pages and the complete impossibility of writing any unique Titles, Descriptions and content. There are just too many of them.
With a footwear client of mine I no indexed a huge slug of tags taking the page count down by about 25% - we saw an immediate 22% increase in organic traffic in the first month. (March 18th 2017 - April 17th 2017) the duplicates were all size and colour related. Since canonicalising (I'm English lol) more content and taking the site from 25,000 pages to around 15,000 the site is now 76% ahead of last year for organics. This is real measurable change.
Now the arguments:
Canonicalisation
How are you going to canonicalise 10,000+ pages ? unless you have some kind of magic bullet you are not going to be able to but lets look at the logic.
Say we have a page of Widgets (brand) and they come in 7 sizes. When the range is fully in stock all of the brand/size pages will be identical to the brand page, apart from the title & description. So it would make sense to canonicalise back to the brand. Even when sizes started to run out, all of the sizes will be on the brand page. So size is a subset of the brand page.
Similar but not the same for colour. If colour is a tag then every colour sorted page will be on the brand page. So really they are the same page - just a slimmer selection. Now I accept that the brand page will contain all colours as it did all sizes but the similarity is so great - 95 % of the content being the same apart from the colour, that it makes sense to call them the same.
So for me Canonicalisation would be the way to go but it's just not possible as there are too many of them.
Noindex
The upside of noindex is that it is generally easier to put the noindex tag on the page as there is no URL to tag. The downside is that the page is then not indexed in Google so you lose a little juice - I would argue by the way that the chances of being found in Google for a size page is extremely slim, less than 2% of visits came from size pages before we junked them and most of those were from a newsletter so reality is <1% not worth bothering about You could leave off the nofollow so that Google crawls through all of the links on the pages - the better option.
Considering your problem and having experience of a number of sites with the same problem Noindex is your solution.
I hope that helps
Kind Regards
Nigel - Carousel Projects.
-
Hi Chris & Nigel,
Thank you for the considered responses. Good points about canonicalizing. A part I find frustrating is that the shared title tag across dozens or hundreds of pages will be across many different products/groups of products. So, the title tag is not a solid way to group canonicals.
Since the url patterns vary, I don't see how I could group these by which dozens or hundreds canonicalize to which one page, let alone make the change in Shopify other than one page at a time. My understanding is that this title tag manipulation is the only handle Shopify gives for making these bulk changes.
Gah!
So, here are my follow up questions:
-
How big of a negative is this in it's as-is state and how much better will noindexing most of the 90% make it Google Organic-wise? I ask because even the BS title tag to noindex project is a huge time suck.
-
If more is ever revealed about how to more efficiently group and canonicalize in Shopify, would adding the canonical after noindexing capture that lost authority later or would the previous noindex have irretrievably lost that?
-
Given all that, would you continue as I am?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
-
Hi Mike
I see this a lot with sites that have a ton of tag groups. One site I am working on has 50,000 pages in Google caused by tags appending themselves to every version of a URL, the site only has 400 products. Example
Site/size-4
Site/womens/size-4
Site/womens/boots/size-4
Site/womens/boots/ankle/size-4
Site/womens/clarks/boots/size-4Etc etc - If there are other tags like colour and features, this can cause a huge 3 dimensional matrix of additional pages that can slow down the crawl of the site - Google may not crawl all of the site as a result.
If it's possible to canonicalse then that is the best option as juice and follows are retained - very often it would be the page with the tag lopped off that the tag should cite.
In extreme circumstances I would consider noindexing the pages as they offer very skinny content and rubbish Meta because it's impossible to handle them individually. I have seen significant improvement in organics as a result.
Personally I don't think it's enough to simply leave Google to figure it out although I have seen some sites with very high DA get away with it.
To be honest I am pretty shocked that Shopify doesn't have a feature to cope with this
Regards
Nigel
Carousel Projects.
-
Hello Michael Johnson and Mozzers,
I have seen Shopify do this a few times, though I do not have clients on that particular platform at the moment. It is frustrating. You're right to want to resolve this issue. Between duplicate content, authority conflicts, and an inflated crawl budget, one issue or another is bound to hold back site performance.
Is this what you would do? Not immediately, no. I want to see those pages canonicalized. That way, your preferred pages get all the juice back from their respective canonical link. Is this an option for you?
**Deindex request... and s_ide effects?**_ Canonical tags would make these part irrelevant (yay less work!). To be thorough though: I'd let Google figure it out unless you have strong evidence your crawl budget is maxed. And I don't see any negative side effects from noindexing duplicate content. If worse comes to worse, you have a good plan.
Shape that content,
CopyChrisSEO and the Vizergy Team
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
-
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Check website update frequency?
Is the tools out there that can check our frequently website is updated with new content products? I'm trying to do an SEO analysis between two websites. Thanks in advance Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
NoIndexing Massive Pages all at once: Good or bad?
If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing? I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0 -
Exact keyword URL or not?
Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Canonical & noindex? Use together
For duplicate pages created by the "print" function, seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not) and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1