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.
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
-
Hello all!
I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd."
These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street".
Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them?
Thanks for any input.
Ken
-
Egol,
Thanks for this. I did consider the sub-domain option and I'm going to discuss this as an option with my team.
Ken
-
Stephan,
There is little Organic Search traffic to these pages but there are a number of links pointing to them. One of the benefits of this type of business is that you're associated with local governments so you do get links from .gov sites. Most go to the service home pages but there are some that drive to the individual issue pages.
The grouping by category is something to think about. I'll discuss with the team.
Thanks!
-
I really like Stpehan's idea of "indexed collections of complaints".
-
Hi Ken,
It depends a little on how the complaints are organised within the site structure, what links they have, and what traffic these pages bring in. Unless you think domain authority is a particularly big factor in the competitive space the site operates in, I wouldn't fixate on DA. Questions you do want to answer:
- Crawl the whole site, preferably using the Google Search Console and/or Google Analytics API with Screaming Frog. Do these complaints bring in (useful) traffic? Surely part of what makes the 311 service useful for community managers is that people in their community can easily comment and see the comments of others? Thinking further down the line, if the site is difficult for people in the community to find, will they use it less, and thus will community managers see less value in the service over time? Indirectly, people leaving complaints is probably a good thing for the service; do they usually do this after searching for "potholes on main street"? This is all guesswork on my part, as I haven't seen the site.
- If you do have a lot of traffic to the complaint pages, is it useful traffic? Could you afford to lose it (because that may happen if you noindex)? Remember to bear in mind the second-order effects: if nobody complains any more, the manager doesn't need a 311 service!
- Do you actually have valuable (external) links to the complaints? We can't guess at that—the only solution is to use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, Majestic, etc...
Without knowing more, I'll just say: there probably isn't value in having an indexed page for each complaint, but there might be value in having indexed collections of complaints, optimised for neighbourhood or street. So if there are 6 complaints about potholes on main street, a first step might be for each individual complaint-page to canonical back to the page detailing all complaints about main street. And if complaints are really that brief (1 or 2 sentences), eventually I'd prefer to change the site structure altogether, so that each complaint didn't get its own page at all, but that I had one page for each neighbourhood/street/etc, with the complaints listed there and preferably summarised in some way (i.e. "8 pothole complaints", "9 traffic light complaints, etc.) That kind of view might be useful if I was a resident of the place. You would still have to deal with pagination, especially if the number of complaints is large, but that's still going to be far fewer pages than if you have one for every complaint individually.
-
Just stating a couple of facts and a couple of things that I believe about those facts..... I'll be clear to state the parts that are beliefs below.
-
If you have a lot of thin content pages on a website then you run the risk of Google seeing those thin content pages and slapping the domain with a Panda problem. I believe that can cause reduced rankings across the entire domain.
-
Google recently said that they are going to stop following the links on noindex pages. From that, I believe that some pagerank will be lost from every link that enters them. I believe that can result in lower rankings for the entire domain.
If I owned the site above. I would place all of these pages where they can be safely noindexed without causing a loss of pagerank and not produce a Panda problem. That would require them to be in a subdomain that is noindexed or on another domain that is no indexed.
That's what I would do with these pages.
-
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
-
Duplicate content in Shopify - subsequent pages in collections
Hello everyone! I hope an expert in this community can help me verify the canonical codes I'll add to our store is correct. Currently, in our Shopify store, the subsequent pages in the collections are not indexed by Google, however the canonical URL on these pages aren't pointing to the main collection page (page 1), e.g. The canonical URL of page 2, page 3 etc are used as canonical URLs instead of the first page of the collections. I have the canonical codes attached below, it would be much appreciated if an expert can urgently verify these codes are good to use and will solve the above issues? Thanks so much for your kind help in advance!! -----------------CODES BELOW--------------- <title><br /> {{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 6, 2019, 8:55 AM | ycnetpro101
{% if page_description %} {% endif %} {% if current_page != 1 %} {% else %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}
{% if current_page == 1 %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'product' %}{% if product %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %} {% endif %}0 -
React.js Single Page Application Not Indexing
We recently launched our website that uses React.js and we haven't been able to get any of the pages indexed. Our previous site (which had a .ca domain) ranked #1 in the 4 cities we had pages and we redirected it to the .com domain a little over a month ago. We have recently started using prerender.io but still haven't seen any success. Has anyone dealt with a similar issue before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 20, 2018, 2:49 AM | m_van0 -
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 23, 2013, 9:51 AM | desmond.liang1 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 3, 2013, 10:24 PM | fablau0 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 7, 2013, 9:51 PM | richardo24hr0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 4, 2012, 9:15 PM | gregelwell0 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 14, 2011, 1:19 PM | PaulRogers0