Are HTML Sitemaps Still Effective With "Noindex, Follow"?
-
A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages.
To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index.
Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?
-
Additional research turned up this Matt Cutts video which addresses my question head on:
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 to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
Should I bother with a Video Sitemap?
Morning all, I've started a pretty aggressive Video content push in recent weeks. All our videos are on our YouTube channel. I decided to go with hosting the videos on YouTube based on my research on moz.com, especially considering the potential reach of the content on YouTube. What I'm finding is that the YouTube channel is doing great. We've hit 200 subscribers and 15K views in a little under a month. Wayyyy more than I could have ever hoped for. But the blog posts on our website are getting minimal traffic and no search visibility. That doesn't necessarily bother me, since the intention of our marketing campaign is to use YouTube to drive traffic to our website. So I guess my question is really more to do with optimizing the site with Video Sitemaps and best practices for Google Webmaster Tools. Right now we have YouTube videos embedded on blog posts like this one that have a time-stamp. But I've been working to create Gallery-style pages (no time-stamp) which would have multiple YouTube videos embedded on them like this one. These make it easier for visitors to watch multiple videos without needing to skip around to multiple blog posts. The challenge I'm running into is that when I go to submit a Video Sitemap to GWT I get an error saying that I have duplicate page content within the video sitemap. I've used several WP plugins to do this. It seems that when there is a video embedded on multiple URLs (pages + posts) the plugins will ignore the posts and only add the pages to the video sitemap. Here is my regular Sitemap Here is my video Sitemap I've attached a screenshot of my current Yoast Video SEO config if that's useful for reference. Does anyone have experience with using multiple sitemaps in GWT? I'm starting to think that maybe I shouldn't even bother with a video sitemap. Maybe those gallery-style pages should just go in the regular sitemap? Any thoughts or advice would be highly appreciated! Thanks llQfydA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TMHoward860 -
Error: Missing required field "updated"
In my WordPress blog, there are pages for tags,categories,... like : https://www.abc.com/blog/category/how-to-cook-something/ On these pages I am getting the following error: Error: Missing required field "updated" So far I have 39 if these errors. Please let me know if this is an important issue to pay attention to? If yes, how I can fix it? Thanks Everyone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
On page report card for the keyword "computers"
I was looking at which websites ranks in the TOP 3 for the keyword "computers"... I noticed that first is wikipedia and then there are Dell and Apple... I then did an on page report card and I noticed that wikipedia has a grade A (which is great ) However, Apple has an F ( which sucks !! ) but there still rank out there. My question is why is Apple ranking for the keyword computers with no tiitle, no URL, no H1, no body, no B/Strong... when wikipedia has all of that and the term " computers " occurs 290 times on its page... Is is due to the fact that apple has millions of external links and is that enough to rank even with an " irrelevant " page ? By the way I have noticed that on other keywords such as " bicycle ". Wikipedia is ranking 1 st and then sites like www.trekbikes.com are out there but they shouldn't based on their homepage "optimization ". I know there are other factors but I am just trying to figure why such sites ( like apple or trek bikes ) rank out there. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
"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 -
Mobile Sitemap
Do I need to submit a sitemap for a mobile site? What are the benefits/disadvantages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Limiting URLS in the HTML Sitemap?
So I started making a sitemap for our new golf site, which has quite a few "low level" pages (about 100 for the golf courses that exist in the area, and then about 50 for course architects), etc etc. My question/open discussion is simple. In a sitemap that already has about 50 links, should we include these other low level 150 links? Of course, the link to the "Golf Courses" is there, along with a link to the "Course Architects" MAIN pages (which, subdivides on THOSE pages.) I have read the limit is around 150 links on the sitemap.html page and while it would be nice to rank long tail for the Golf Courses. All in all, our site architecture itself is easily crawlable as well. So the main question is just to include ALL the links or just the main ones? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0 -
Why DBDResults.com is #1 on Google for "Internet Marketing Agency"?
They have a new site, no links, no content, their page isn't optimized for this keyword (it's not even one on the page or their page title)... They only have 5 incoming links with the keyword in it, but its competitors have way more. Can someone solve this mystery?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse0