10,000 New Pages of New Content - Should I Block in Robots.txt?
-
I'm almost ready to launch a redesign of a client's website. The new site has over 10,000 new product pages, which contain unique product descriptions, but do feature some similar text to other products throughout the site.
An example of the page similarities would be the following two products:
-
Brown leather 2 seat sofa
-
Brown leather 4 seat corner sofa
Obviously, the products are different, but the pages feature very similar terms and phrases.
I'm worried that the Panda update will mean that these pages are sand-boxed and/or penalised.
Would you block the new pages? Add them gradually? What would you recommend in this situation?
-
-
Consider reversing your thinking from "what will be my loss to panda" into "what can I do to make this site kick ass".
Reach for opportunity, extend yourself.
If this was my site I would get a writer on those product descriptions to make them unquestionably unique, beef them up, add salesmanship and optimize them for search. This will give you substantive unique content, that converts better, pulls more long tail traffic and moves out of competition with other sites that do the minimal.
Sure, it will cost money but in the long run it could bring back a huge return.
My only caution on this is that if you make this investment in writing you need to do that on a site that has can pull reasonable traffic. If you do this on a site that has no links it will not do you much good. It is part of a marketing plan not a single item on a "to do" list.
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
-
Scary bug in search console: All our pages reported as being blocked by robots.txt after https migration
We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain. Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic, if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue?0 -
Is robots met tag a more reliable than robots.txt at preventing indexing by Google?
What's your experience of using robots meta tag v robots.txt when it comes to a stand alone solution to prevent Google indexing? I am pretty sure robots meta tag is more reliable - going on own experiences, I have never experience any probs with robots meta tags but plenty with robots.txt as a stand alone solution. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
Requesting New Custom URL for Google+ Local Business Page
This question is about the new custom URLs for Google+ Local Business pages: Has anyone heard any success stories with requesting a custom URL different than the two reserved ones offered by Google via contacting a Google Rep by phone? And what advantages might there be for a local business to go with a very long custom URL such asgoogle.com/+rosenbergAndDalgrenLLPFortLauderdale as opposed to just google.com/+RdLawyers? Does having the city name in the URL offer any <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> benefit? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gbkevin0 -
Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?
We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
Robots.txt is blocking Wordpress Pages from Googlebot?
I have a robots.txt file on my server, which I did not develop, it was done by the web designer at the company before me. Then there is a word press plugin that generates a robots.txt file. How Do I unblock all the wordpress pages from googlebot?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO0 -
Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?
Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt? I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss12