Pages with Little Content
-
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed.
I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed.
Here is an example page with very little content
-
If you've already cut internal links and they're only in RSS, I probably would NOINDEX them, personally. You're basically telling Google that they're low-value (for now, at least) but then you're letting them be [possibly] indexed and potentially diluting the rest of your index (and ranking power). That way, people can still access them, but you're not risking Panda issues or other problems.
Over time, as you add content and boost your domain authority and link profile, you can start phasing in more pages.
-
Hi As Brent has said you cannot prevent Google from crawling the site. Once the site is indexed and Google starts to visit the site more frequently it is likely at some point to find the pages. However, based on the limited information and more importantly the lack of any real unique content i would advise that you take what ever steps you can from limiting the visibility of these pages. I do not believe you will lose rank but you certainly will not gain any. Thanks
-
_First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most _
likely links to them?
Actually there are only currently links to the pages with an actual
description. I have disabled links to those with no description. The
way the site is set up at the moment means that a page is created,
but not necessarily linked to
(see [http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/live-music](http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/live-music)).
_After looking at your example page what if you made a unique _
_description for each artist / performer and then have a list _
_of events that is always changing under them that way you have _
_some type of unique content that would be helpful._
I think I'd have the same problem there would still be thousands of
artists (nevermind festivals etc). I do want to list as many events
as possible and I think my users would prefer a comprehensive number
of listings without descriptions rather than a small number of event
listings with descriptions. Some listings do have more substantial
descriptions e.g. [St Patrick's Day in Dublin](http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/arts-culture/festivals/st-patricks-festival-and-parade "St Patrick's Day")
My overall question is should I prevent Google from indexing pages
with little content (as the original example) or just let it
do it's thang au naturale?
-
Hi Andy,
First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most likely links to them? ( And if not how would users find these otherwise? )
After looking at your example page what if you made a unique description for each artist / performer and then have a list of events that is always changing under them that way you have some type of unique content that would be helpful.
-Brent
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 does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Dynamic pages
Hello Team, How can we create dynamic pages or more pages on website but maintaining SEO standards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
What to do with Authoritative footer pages?
Alo everyone! The site I'm working on has had a homepage that essentially used the footer as the main form of navigation on the site and the PA of each of those pages reflects that. I'm helping them re-organize the site (I'm still a noob though), and was curious for some input on this particular situation. Some of the most authoritative pages are: 1. www.charged.fm/privacy - PA 29 2. www.charged.fm/terms - PA 29 My question: Is this just a consequence of previous mistakes that we live with, or is there something involving 301's and creation of new pages that could help us utilize the link juice on these pages. Or should we come up with ways to internally link to 'money' pages from these pages instead? Thanks for any input, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Will Using Attributes For Landing Pages In Magento Dilute Page Rank?
Hello Mozzers! We have an ecommerce site built on Magento. We would like to use attribute filters in our layered navigation for landing page purposes. Each page will have a unique URL, Meta Title and Meta Description. For example: URL: domain.com/art/abstract (category is Art, attribute is Abstract) Title: Abstract Art For Sale Meta: Blah Blah Blah Currently these attribute pages are not being indexed by google as they are set in google parameters. We would like to edit google parameters to start indexing some of the attribute filters that users search for, so they can be used as landing pages. Does anyone have experience with this? Is this a good idea? What are the consequences? Will this dilute Page Rank? Could this destroy the world? Cheers! MozAddict
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Indexation of content from internal pages (registration) by Google
Hello, we are having quite a big amount of content on internal pages which can only be accessed as a registered member. What are the different options the get this content indexed by Google? In certain cases we might be able to show a preview to visitors. In other cases this is not possible for legal reasons. Somebody told me that there is an option to send the content of pages directly to google for indexation. Unfortunately he couldn't give me more details. I only know that this possible for URLs (sitemap). Is there really a possibility to do this for the entire content of a page without giving google access to crawl this page? Thanks Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guitarslinger0 -
How can we optimize content specific to particular tabs, but is loaded on one page?
Hi, Our website generates stock reports. Within those reports, we organize information into particular tabs. The entire report is loaded on one page and javascript is used to hide and show the different tabs. This makes it difficult for us to optimize the information on each particular tab. We're thinking about creating separate pages for each tab, but we're worried about affecting the user experience. We'd like to create separate pages for each tab, put links to them at the bottom of the reports, and still have the reports operate as they do today. Can we do this without getting in trouble with Google for having duplicate content? If not, is there another solution to this problem that we're not seeing? Here's a sample report: http://www.vuru.co/analysis/aapl In advance, thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yosephwest0 -
Duplicate content
I have just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world and I would like to know which option is the best fit for my case. I have the website http://www.hotelelgreco.gr and every image in image library http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx has a different url but is considered duplicate with others of the library. Please suggest me what should i do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
"Duplicate" Page Titles and Content
Hi All, This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me! SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site. The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/ Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page. The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France": http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated. http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle. There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in. What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification. Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome. Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0