"Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
-
Hey there Mozzers,
I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow" on these pages. What do you think?
Has someone faced this situation before?
Will appreciate your input!
-
+1 to EGOL and Ginaluca. We need more information about that pages.
In any case, if we are talking about thin content, but if is quality content and it's not duplicated content or oriented-for-SEO content, I would not use noindex for it.
If we ar talking about empty pages or almost empty pages maybe is better to use noindex, or maybe is better to delete and redirect with 301 this pages.
I would reduce the internal linking, and maybe put those internal links lower or in places with less visibility. Just that.
Greetings!
-
EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.
That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.
It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).
So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.
p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.
-
If you want good responses to this question, then post more about these pages (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, purpose of pages, etc.) and more about your site (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, etc.).
Questions with little information are often ignored by people who might know a lot about the subject because they don't want to guess, they don't want to think about and write about all possible cases, put their effort into a question when the poster didn't put much of his own effort into explaining.
Also, who are you? Owner? Employee? SEO? Are you the guy who put these pages up and didn't put any content on them? The guy who paid for the skinny content that is currently up there and needs to have input on yanking them down or paying for proper content?
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
-
Why is my inner pages ranking higher than main page?
Hi everyone, for some reason lately i have discovered that Google is ranking my inner pages higher than the main subfolder page. www.domain.com/subfolder --> Target page to be ranked
Technical SEO | | davidboh
www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus ---> page that is currently ranking Also in the SERP most of the time, it is showing both links in this manner. www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus
-----------www.domain.com/subfolder Thanks in advance.1 -
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
N/A page rank or "grey bar"
I have a web site that is over 10 yrs old, It also has over 30,000 links to it. Last week it received a N/A or "grey bar" page rank. The site also still is listed in the SERPS for my keywords, in fact for a few they have actually improved. The organic traffic is following the same pattern as last year. Webmaster tools doesnt list any critical issues or errors. Is there anything I can do to remedy the situation, or is this just a wait and see? Website is www.netnanny.com.
Technical SEO | | Court_H0 -
Use webmaster tools "change of address" when doing rel=canonical
We are doing a "soft migration" of a website. (Actually it is a merger of two websites). We are doing cross site rel=canonical tags instead of 301's for the first 60-90 days. These have been done on a page by page basis for an entire site. Google states that a "change of address" should be done in webmaster tools for a site migration with 301's. Should this also be done when we are doing this soft move?
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0 -
Is using a customer quote on multiple pages duplicate content?
Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Top pages give " page not found"
A lot of my top pages point to images in a gallery on my site. When I click on the url under the name of the jpg file I get an error page not found. For instance this link: http://www.fastingfotografie.nl/architectuur-landschap/single-gallery/10162327 Is this a problem? Thanks. Thomas. JkLej.png
Technical SEO | | thomasfasting0 -
Video thumbnail pages with "sort" feature -- tons of duplicate content?
A client has 2 separate pages for video thumbnails. One page is "popular videos" with a sort function for over 700 pages of video thumbnails with 10 thumbnails and short desriptions per page. (/videos?sort_by=popularity). The second page is "latest videos" (/videos?sort_by=latest) with over 7,000 pages. Both pages have a sort function -- including latest, relevance, popularity, time uploaded, etc. Many of the same video thumbnails appear on both pages. Also, when you click a thumbnail you get a full video page and these pages appear to get indexed well. There seem to be duplicate content issues between the "popular" and "latest" pages, as well as within the sort results on each of those pages. (A unique URL is generated everytime you use the sort function i.e. /videos?sort_by=latest&uploaded=this_week). Before my head explodes, what is the best way to treat this? I was thinking a noindex,follow meta robot on every page of thumbnails since the individual video pages are well indexed, but that seems extreme. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Mask links with JS that point to noindex'ed paged
Hi, in an effort to prepare our page for the Panda we dramatically reduced the number of pages that can be indexed (from 100k down to 4k). All the remaining pages are being equipped with unique and valuable content. We still have the other pages around, since they represent searches with filter combination which we deem are less interesting to the majority of users (hence they are not indexed). So I am wondering if we should mask links to these non-indexed pages with JS, such that Link-Juice doesn't get lost to those. Currently the targeted pages are non-index via "noindex, follow" - we might de-index them with robots.txt though, if the "site:" query doesn't show improvements. Thanks, Sebastian
Technical SEO | | derderko0