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.
"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.
-
trung.ngo - check out this article I posted http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
that's where I got my "inspiration" from to consider using robots.txt instead...
-
I am thinking if I exclude more thin pages from being crawled (robots.txt) that may be better than my current "noindex, follow" - the thin pages are already "noindex, follow".
You are saying "unless there's evidence that the pages are taking up too much of the crawl bandwidth, it doesn't seem like too much of an issue to me." - but how would I know this? Fair to assume for a website with 5,000 pages this is probably not an issue?
I am concerned with the "noindex, follow" Google may think "ahh, we have seen all this stuff before. Thanks for keeping out of our index, but we are still going to devalue your original content indexed pages because we crawl and see all this thin stuff." I am thinking with the robots.txt it would potentially be a stronger signal that could help my indexed pages. Or you think it is a minor and probably not relevant?
-
Hello there,
Have you had any duplicate content or crawling issues in the past or is this more of a preventative measure? If the pages, as you put it, "would not generate relevant search traffic", then I would argue that it'd make sense to "noindex, follow" based on the assumption that the pages are not currently driving search traffic, and have no real potential to contribute significantly to brand discovery via a search engine in the future.
I wouldn't necessarily say that Google crawling your page more frequently would automatically give you a boost in rankings; it's more associated with whether or not they're crawling pages frequently enough to index updates to the pages. So unless there's evidence that the pages are taking up too much of the crawl bandwidth, it doesn't seem like too much of an issue to me.
All of this to say, take a look at the data to see if a real problem exists--whether crawl resources or duplicate content--before doing anything drastic. And, of course, also understand what you'll be losing by making the updates. If you do choose to prevent crawling via robots.txt and are at all concerned with the duplicate/thin content aspect, remember to implement a noindex and confirm that the pages are removed from search results before disallowing in robots.txt--otherwise, they'll remain indexed.
-
Hi Keri, There are some good comments but none really answer this question and that is why I am trying to approach from different angles. Maybe you can shed some light on this:
AJ Kohn wrote this great article: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization - he talks about using robots.txt to exclude thin content in order to increase frequency with qhich indexed content gets crawled, supposedly helping rankings. In this great whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests using "noindex, follow" - http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls.I am trying to get more light on this (people who have experience with this), but struggle to get answers.
-
I noticed you had similar questions at http://moz.com/community/q/unique-content-below-fold-better-move-above-fold and http://moz.com/community/q/risk-using-nofollow-tag with several answers each, including some that were marked as Good Answer. Did any of those answers help to answer your question?
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
-
Google indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Large robots.txt file
We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately) Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down. Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
Kadel0 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
So You No-Follow Privacy Policy Pages etc?
site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Some people have recently suggested my homepage is giving out to much PR. Do I need to no-follow the "about us", "Customer Service" and "contact us" pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"
Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia0