What's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX
-
Hello Mozers;
I am having an issue, my client has 10K pages on their site; in WP, and they have a classified section.
Question #1: I am asking, what's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX, for their Classified section.
They currently have no SEO plug ins, that fix their errors, and warnings.
Question #2: My question is also, do I want the Categories crawled, or INDEXED or NOINDEX?
Check out their Campaign results by Moz:
-
Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)
32
-
Too Many On-Page Links
9,032
-
Missing Meta Description Tag
6,234
-
-
If you want someone to confirm Matts answer I would do the same thing.
Hope that help,
Thomas
-
Hi
I personally would say that you want all your classifieds ads indexed (INDEX) as they will help with your long tail traffic from the search engines. I used to run a classified ads section on a site that I ran and the classified ads system picked up a fair amount of long tail traffic. In turn this helped drive more traffic and conversions through the site as a whole.
Have you considered adding a plugin like Yoast SEO? This is an excellent tool and it will help you sort out your Moz Campaign results.
Have a look here - http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
As far as too many on-page links goes moz reports what is best standard but I can tell you from experience that I have had successful sites redesigned and there on-page links have increased to above this threshold so have been flagged by Moz. However my rankings went up even with this issue because it made sense from a users perspective so I stuck with it and it paid off.
Meta descriptions are your page description and call to action so not having them misses out on the added benefit of enticing a potential visitor from the SERPs. However Google is pretty good at determining what meta to incorporate and this element doesn't directly affect your rankings. I used to have a summary section/text box that users had to enter a short description into in order to submit a classified. This was also used to populate meta description. It just made this element easier to populate and make unique I found.
FINAL NOTE - just to be clear you don't want to restrict access to any of your sites content in terms classified adds and their categories - the more unique content that is indexed the better it is for your SEO - more chances of picking up traffic especially from the long tail specific searches.
I hope this helps
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
-
How do you optimize a blog post for SEO after the RankBrain?
Hi Guys Just curious to hear what you guys do to rank blog posts in the top in Google especially onsite, after the RankBrain update? Do you still use SEO tools to optimize this or are the SEO tools outdated for this? If yes which tools do you use to get success with? Cheers John
Algorithm Updates | | igniterman750 -
Tens of duplicate homepages indexed and blocked later: How to remove from Google cache?
Hi community, Due to some WP plugin issue, many homepages indexed in Google with anonymous URLs. We blocked them later. Still they are in SERP. I wonder whether these are causing some trouble to our website, especially as our exact homepages indexed. How to remove these pages from Google cache? Is that the right approach? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Still no good search results after 2 months of indexation
Hi guys, One of our website (https://www.residentiebosrand.be/) has been online for about two months. It's indexed and Google shows search results. But the website is not ranking on the keywords it's supposed to be ranking: 'residentie bosrand'. How come we still don't find the website on the first pages in the search results, while these are the main keywords on the website's URL, page, ... ? Best regards,
Algorithm Updates | | conversal0 -
Google indexing https sites by default now, where's the Moz blog about it!
Hello and good morning / happy Friday! Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl. I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so. Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/ http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites. I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this. Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions: It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies. It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt. It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page. It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag. It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs. The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL. The server has a valid TLS certificate. One rule that confuses me a bit is : **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. ** Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Deacyde0 -
Undertanding Google's PMD (Partial Matching Domain) policy...
Hi, If your business name contains keywords, is that an issue? Some companies, have keyword based brand names... So what is Google's policy regarding EMD or PMD? What happens when the company name has a keyword in it? If anyone could help clarify, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Ben
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Sudden drop in rankings and indexed pages!
Over the past few days I have noticed some apparent major changes. Before I explain, let me say this: Checking my analytics and WMT: There is an increase in traffic (even via google organic) There is no drop in impressions or clicks There is no drop in indexed pages in GWT Having said that; When I check my indexed pages using site:www.mywebsite.com, I see only 30 results as opposed to the 120K that I was seeing before (it was steadily climbing). The indexed pages have increase 3 fold in the past year, because of the increase in pages, updates, and products on the site. I see a sudden drop in rankings for major keywords that had been steadily rising. For example, I had some major keywords that were on page 7-8, not they are on page 20+ or not at all. Also, the page that used to show in the rankings has changed. I have only done white-hat guest blogging in the past year for link building, on a small scale (maybe 20-30 links in a year). They only other change recently, is that we are: Posting products on Houzz and Pinterest daily adding our site to all local directories (white pages, Yelp, citysearch, etc.) My site got hit by Penguin more than a year ago, but we have done everything right since, and our traffic via organic results has more than doubled since the Penguin release. What the hell is going on? Should I be concerned?
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
Dropped off cliff for a partic keyword & can't find out why
At the beginning of Dec we ranked consistently in the top 3 for the keyword 'Suffolk' for the site www.suffolktouristguide.com (apge rank 4, thousands of quality inboud links, site age 5 years +). Since then we've been falling off a cliff and today aren't even in the top 50 for this search term, but most of our othr search terms are unaffected. Our SEOMoz grade remains A for 'Suffolk' and we haven't changed anything in that time that could have had such a material effect (knowingly at least). A similar issue happened to my other site www.suffolkhotelsguide.com back in April and it hasn't recovered despite grade A's on the homepage and key pages. We've checked internal broken links, page download times, external links (used the disavow tool and reconsideration request and got back 'We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google'); etc etc Any thoughts on what I can try next? All suggestions appreciated as I am completely stuck (& have spent a fortune on 'SEO experts' to no effect).
Algorithm Updates | | SarahinSuffolk0 -
How to speed up indexing of my site...
Only 4 out of the 12 pages of my blog/site have been indexed. How can I ensure all the pages get indexed? I'm using a wordpress site, and I also wondered how could I speed the indexing process up (I have submitted a site map) Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | copywritingbuzz0