undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. No Index thousands of thin content pages?

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?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
3
6
2.0k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • KenSchaefer
    KenSchaefer last edited by Feb 10, 2018, 11:14 AM

    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

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • KenSchaefer
      KenSchaefer @EGOL last edited by Feb 11, 2018, 9:03 AM Feb 11, 2018, 9:03 AM

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • KenSchaefer
        KenSchaefer @StephanSolomonidis last edited by Feb 11, 2018, 9:01 AM Feb 11, 2018, 9:01 AM

        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!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • EGOL
          EGOL @StephanSolomonidis last edited by Feb 10, 2018, 4:51 PM Feb 10, 2018, 4:51 PM

          I really like Stpehan's idea of "indexed collections of complaints".

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • StephanSolomonidis
            StephanSolomonidis last edited by Feb 11, 2018, 9:04 AM Feb 10, 2018, 3:41 PM

            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.

            EGOL KenSchaefer 2 Replies Last reply Feb 11, 2018, 9:01 AM Reply Quote 2
            • EGOL
              EGOL last edited by Feb 11, 2018, 9:03 AM Feb 10, 2018, 2:58 PM

              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.

              1. 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.

              2. 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.

              KenSchaefer 1 Reply Last reply Feb 11, 2018, 9:03 AM Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              1 out of 6
              • First post
                1/6
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • amarieyoussef

                Should I index resource submission forms, thank you pages, etc.?

                Should I index resource submission forms, thank you, event pages, etc.? Doesn't Google consider this content too thin?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 10, 2020, 5:54 PM | amarieyoussef
                0
              • Caro-O

                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!
                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.
                Caro

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM | Caro-O
                0
              • Online-Marketing-Guy

                Substantial difference between Number of Indexed Pages and Sitemap Pages

                Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
                About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
                Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
                Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
                Jochen

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 5, 2015, 6:10 PM | Online-Marketing-Guy
                0
              • khi5

                "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.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 3, 2014, 6:04 PM | khi5
                0
              • EndeR-

                No-index pages with duplicate content?

                Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 30, 2014, 4:18 PM | EndeR-
                0
              • fablau

                Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?

                Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 3, 2013, 10:43 AM | fablau
                0
              • CommercePundit

                Number of Indexed Pages are Continuously Going Down

                I am working on online retail stores. Initially, Google have indexed 10K+ pages of my website. I have checked number of indexed page before one week and pages were 8K+. Today, number of indexed pages are 7680. I can't understand why should it happen and How can fix it? I want to index maximum pages of my website.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 2, 2012, 9:34 PM | CommercePundit
                0
              • nicole.healthline

                Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?

                When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 26, 2011, 6:32 PM | nicole.healthline
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.