Which pages to "noindex"
-
I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on.
I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on:
legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
search results page
blog archive and category pagesThanks for any insight of this.
-
Here are two posts that may be helpful in both explaining how to set up a robots.txt for wordpress, and the thinking behind setting up which parts to exclude.
http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization
The wordpress link (second link) has a link to several other resources as well.
-
Yes I'm using wordpress.
-
You also want to block any admin directory, plugin directory, etc. Are you using Wordpress or a specific CMS? There are often best-practice posts for robots.txt files for specific platforms.
-
yes, generally you would noindex your about us, contact us, privacy, terms pages since these are rarely searched and in fact are so heavily linked to internally that they would rank well if indexed.
all search results should be noindexed - google wants to do the search
definitely NOT blog/category pages - these are your gold content!
I also noindex any URL accessed by https
-
As well as pagination pages I have read, but not done it myself, that you should consider using it on low value pages that you are wouldn't want to rank above other pages on the site (hopefully they wouldn't anyway) and also sitemaps as don't necessarily want them to appear in the index but definitely want them followed.
-
Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.
-
I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy
-
Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors
-
Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these
Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.
-
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
-
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Rel="publisher" validation error in html5
Using HTML5 I am getting a validation error on in my HTML Validation error: Bad value publisher for attribute rel on element link: Not an absolute IRI. The string publisher is not a registered keyword or absolute URL. This just started showing up on Tuesday in validation errors. Never showed up in the past. Has something changed?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
"Not Selected" in index status rising continously
Hello, After the penguin update my site slowly suffered loss in traffic. and now from daily 15K-18K its droped to 8K. (6K in weekends) I have been trying to find out what the reasons are but i havent got any good luck yet been few months now. I noticed this change in the GWT tho : Not selected in index status significantly risen up. please see attached image. My site is Designzzz i am continously fixing errors and problems shown in the seomoz pro tools. If you guys can take few mins to evaluate what could be the reason for such drop i will be thankful :} cheers 6Xtkp.jpg
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
Can name="author" register as a link?
Hi all, We're seeing a very strange result in Google Webmaster tools. In "Links to your site", there is a site which we had nothing to do with (i.e. we didn't design or build it) showing over 1600 links to our site! I've checked the site several times now, and the only reference to us is in the rel="author" tag. Clearly the agency that did their design / SEO have nicked our meta, forgetting to delete or change the author tag!! There are literally no other references to us on this site, there hasn't every been (to our knowledge, at least) and so I'm very puzzled as to why Google thinks there are 1600+ links pointing to us. The only thing I can think of is that Google will recognise name="author" content as a link... seems strange, though. Plus the content="" only contains our company name, not our URL. Can anybody shed any light on this for me? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
What to do about "blocked by meta-robots"?
The crawl report tells me "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". One of these interesting facts is that my blog archives are "blocked by meta robots". Articles are not blocked, just the archives. What is a "meta" robot? I think its just normal (since the article need only be crawled once) but want a second opinion. Should I care about this?
Technical SEO | | GPN0