Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
-
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL.Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website?
I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.
-
besides my comment below the other issue I am facing is that I have several neighborhoods I would like to rank for within a region. Does this mean best idea is to get rid of these neighborhood pages (via noindex or other solution) and just focus on the region, until I am able to add unique content to the neighborhood pages?
-
rel=canonical may be difficult because each page has several pages, like:
example.com/region-name, example.com/region-name-2, example.com/region-name-3 etc
example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name, example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name-2 etcI do NOT have a "view all" page. Page 3 on the neighborhood page may include 30% of data found on page 3 of region page etc.
So what to be done?
-
So you exactly have an idea that you can work around with the MLS pages to make them more unique which in my opinion is the ideal choice so let’s move to the real question.
I don’t think no-follow is a bad option but if I would be at your places I would have used rel canonical instead of no follow.
Rel canonical simply tells search engine out of the two identical (or almost identical) page which one is the preferred version of the URL.
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
-
Website homepage must be first link from every page of sub folders which are related in content?
Hi, I have seen number of websites where they keep their website homepage as first link from every page of sub folders and even from sub domain pages some times. For example, giving website homepage as top navigational menu from every page in their blog. Will this helps in boosting the ranking of homepage if we link from sub folder or sub domain pages where they employ related content like blogs or help guides. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Bespoke Website With Lack of Front Page Content
Hey guys, I wanted to ask you your opinion.. If you had a website - portfolio style for argument's sake and it was based on wordpress, obviously the front page won't be SEO friendly if you want to keep the minimalistic approach - there will be hardly any content to tell google what to rank your site for... So my question is, can you use a plugin that Google can 'see' content - such as a long unique article - that the user can't see in order to help you rank? I.e. for Gbot, the plugin would load the content plugin as plain html, but 'hide' it from most people visiting the site... What would you do in this scenario? Your response would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geniusenergyltd0 -
Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other. The domains are geo specific, so for example. www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz, and www.page.fr with content xxx is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Is my landing page "over-optimized"? Please help
Hello out there My website www.painterdublin.com and www.tilers-dublin.com were heavily hit by google panda update on 27.9.2012 and EMD update few days after. I lost about 70% of the traffic mainly from combination of the keywords from my domain name (painter dublin and tilers dublin) and never managed to recover from it. I am wondering if I should also concentrate on rewriting the content of both home landing pages in the terms of "KEYWORD DENSITY". Do you think my content is "OVER OPTIMIZED" for my main keywords? (painter dublin, tilers-dublin). What is the correct use? Is there any tool to guide me? I am aware I am using those terms quite often. I don't want to start deleting those terms before I know the right way to do it. Is there anybody willing to have a look at my sites and give me advice please? kind regards Jaro
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarik0 -
"Too many links" - PageRank question
This question seems to come up a lot. 70 flat page site. For ease of navigation, I want to link every page to one-another. Pure CSS Dropdown menu with categories - each expanding to each of the subpage. Made, implemented, remade smartphone friendly. Hurray. I thought this was an SEO principle - ensuring good site navigation and good internal linking. Not forcing your users to hit "back". Not forcing your users to jump through hoops. But unless I've misread http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many then this is something that's indirectly penalised by Google because a site with 70 links from its homepage only lets each sub-page inherit 1/80th of its PageRank. Good site navigation vs your subpages are invisible on Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesFx0 -
Getting Google in index but display "parent" pages..
Greetings esteemed SEO experts - I'm hunting for advice: We operate an accommodation listings website. We monetize by listing position in search results, i.e. you pay more to get higher placing in the page. Because of this, while we want individual detailed listing pages to be indexed to get the value of the content, we don't really want them appearing in Google search results. We ideally want the "content value" to be attributed to the parent page - and google to display this as the link in the search results instead of the individual listing. Any ideas on how to achieve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0 -
Use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Google states that use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended when: You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post. Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland. Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page. Does this mean that if I write new content in different language for a website hosted on my sub-domain, I should not use this tag? Regards, Shailendra Sial
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0