Does "Noindex" lead to Loss of Link Equity?
-
Our company has two websites with about 8,000 duplicate articles between them. Yep, 8,000 articles were posted on both sites over the past few years. This is the definition of cross-domain duplicate content.
Plan A is to set all of the articles to "noindex,follow" on the site that we care less about (site B). We are not redirecting since we want to keep the content on that site for on-site traffic to discover. If we do set them to "noindex," my concern is that we'll lose massive amounts of link equity acquired over time...and thus lose domain authority...thus overall site rankability. Does Google treat pages changed to "noindex" the same as 404 pages? If so, then I imagine we would lose massive link equity.
Plan B is to just wait it out since we're migrating site B to site A in 6-9 months, and hope that our more important site (site A) doesn't get a Panda penalty in the meantime.
Thoughts on the better plan?
-
Thank you, Ian.
We thought about manually setting the canonicals on specific pages of site B to be the URL of the same article on site A...but we don't have the bandwidth to do this for 8,000 articles...plus, we're redirecting site B to site A in @ 9 months anyways. Really just looking for the best short term solution to protect site A in the meantime from Panda updates targeting duplicate content.
EGOL gives a good breakdown of what he thinks is best. Thanks for sharing that link. I guess I'm dummy for forgetting that the "follow" portion of "noindex,follow" allows link juice to be spread to the pages linked to from the "noindex" page. That makes logical sense...but will it protect our domain authority? I would think so, but don't know for sure. If anyone is more certain than I am, please do add a vote of confidence
-
I believe EGOL answered this one:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice
However, I wonder - can't you just use rel=canonical. That works cross and intra-domain.
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
-
In Search Console, why is the XML sitemap "issue" count 5x higher than the URL submission count?
Google Search Console is telling us that there are 5,193 sitemap "issues" - URLs that are present on the XML sitemap that are blocked by robots.txt However, there are only 1,222 total URLs submitted on the XML sitemap. I only found 83 instances of URLs that fit their example description. Why is the number of "issues" so high? Does it compound over time as Google re-crawls the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Need to update Google Search Console profile for http to https change. Will a "change of address" option suffice or do we need to create a new GSC profile?
In the past I have seen most clients create new Google Search Profile when they update to a https URL. However a colleague of mine asked if just updating the change of address option will suffice https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106. Would it be best to just update the change of address for the Google Search Console profile to keep the data seamless? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
What Links to Disavow?
I am looking through my website's link profile that I pulled directly from Google Webmaster Tools. What is the best way to determine the links to disavow? Maybe the Webmaster Tools list is not the best list for this process but I really need to clean up the links that are hurting the site's SEO. Does anyone have any insight?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
Link building… how to get high rewarding links?
Hi Guys, I have a few people whom I have built relationships up in my industry with that would like to link to my site. Is there any particular things I need to be mindful of before having them link to me? I'm just mindful of the unknown. Also, which links to use etc? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
How to remove "Results 1 - 20 of 47" from Google SERP Snippet
We are trying to optimise our SERP snippet in Google to increase CTR, but we have this horrid "Results 1 - 20 of 47" in the description. We feel this gets in the way of the message and so wish to remove it, but how?? Any ideas apart from removing the paging from the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedyseo0 -
Link anchor text: only useful for pages linked to directly or distributed across site?
As a SEO I understand that link anchor text for the focus keyword on the page linked to is very important, but I have a question which I can not find the answer to in any books or blogs, namely: does inbound anchor text 'carry over' to other pages in your site, like linkjuice? For instance, if I have a homepage focusing on keyword X and a subpage (with internal links to it) focusing on keyword Y. Does is then help to link to the homepage with keyword Y anchor texts? Will this keyword thematically 'flow through' the internal link structure and help the subpage's ranking? In a broader sense: will a diverse link anchor text profile to your homepage help all other pages in your domain rank thematically? Or is link anchor text just useful for the direct page that is linked to? All views and experiences are welcome! Kind regards, Joost van Vught
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoostvanVught0