Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?

[fablau]

Hello,

I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages.

Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow".

At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages.

Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter?

Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome.

Thank you!

Fabrizio

[fablau]

Julian, we sell digital sheet music and the additional 100,000 are products from Alfred music publishing company. Of course they will not be "high quality pages", but they are product pages, each one offering a piece of music. We are an e-commerce website, how can we avoid having product pages?! But of course, as Wesley said above, we can improve each product page quality content by giving more/custom information for each product, increasing user reviews, etc.

Other suggestions?

[fablau]

Thank you Wesley, yes, I think you are right. Our business is suffering really too much without traffic coming from the "noindex" pages, and after many months we still don't see recovery. I think the best approach would be probably to keep the pages in the index and differentiate them as much as we can.

Thank you!

[julianhearn]

Panda is probably the worst penalty to have. Very few site ever recover, even though site owner have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to solve it. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491

In this video, about 12.43 - matt cutts is clear, if you think its low quality 404 it, in other delete it.

May I ask why you want to keep these 180,000 pages live? And why are you planning to add another 100,000 pages? Surely they cant be high quality pages?

[WesleySmits]

Fabrizo, as far as I know Google Panda is now part of the standard Google algorithm and it won't be a periodic event anymore. Penguin still is though.

If your product pages are duplicate content according to Google try and see if you can do something about that instead of no-indexing it. Is there no way you can update the products so they display a more prominent description? I understand that manually it's not a possibility because there are way too much products for that to be an option.

I did notice that on a lot of your product pages you have a standard text: "This item includes: PDF (digital sheet music to print), Scorch files (for online playing, transposition and printing), Videos, MIDI and Mp3 audio files (including <a title="This item includes Mp3 music accompaniment files.">Mp3 music accompaniment files</a>)*
Genre: classical
Skill Level: medium"

Since this is basicly the only text on a lot of pages I think it's a big part of the problem. Maybe you can change this text so it looks different for every product?

Try tools like http://www.plagspotter.com/ to find the duplicate content and see which solution is best for your specific problem.

I hope i helped and if you need more help let me know

[fablau]

I understand what you mean and I agree with you in general, but specifically to our own website, I have no idea who put that link on that page, which is by the way a "nofollow" link. We never built links, all our incoming links are either natural and/or links from our own affiliates. I don't see much of "that stuff" on our back-link profile... am I in error?

Anyhow, yes, we are aware the situation is quite complex. Thank you again.

[SVmedia]

I actually looked at the competitors ranking #3 and #4 for the phrase "download sheet music" since your ranking 5th.  Either way, its not a matter of too much or too little.  It's how much of the link profile is authentic vs how much is made up of stuff like this....

http://www.dionneco.com/2011/02/love-is-a-parallax/

that's what I meant by fake links.

I think what you may be missing is how complex the situation really is.  There's a lot more to be considered than a number in Open Site Explorer - which is actually only a portions of what's really out there.

You may also want to look at changes you can make on-site.  I'm a firm believer that proper HTML, accessibility, UX and all that really matter.

[fablau]

Thank you Takeshi, I think you got the problem right. The "crawling" side of the issue is something I was thinking about too!

We are actually working on every aspect of our website to improve its content because we have suffered by Panda a lot in the past two years, so here is the strategy we begun to take since March:

1. "noindexing" most of our thin or almost-duplicate content to get it removed from the index

2. Improve our best content and differentiate it as much as we can with compelling content (this takes a long time!)

3. Consolidating similar pages with the use of canonical tags.

In order to tackle the "slower crawling" problem you have highlighted here, do you think that would be probably better for us to stop engines to crawl those pages altogether via robots.txt once they have been removed? Would that solve the crawl issue? I could do that at least with these new 100,000 new product pages we plan to add!

Thank you!

[fablau]

Wesley, that's because of being penalized by Panda several times in the past... so we are trying the "clean-up" strategy with the hope to be "de-penalized" by Panda at the next related algorithm update. Looks like we had too many "thin" or "almost duplicate" pages... that's why we removed so many pages from the index! But if we don't see improvements in the coming 1-2 months, I guess we'll put the product pages in the index because our business is suffering a big deal!

[fablau]

Colin, what do you mean with "fake links" exactly? Our link profile looks actually in better shape than our main competitors:

virtualsheetmusic.com (our site): links: 614,013    root domains: 2,233

sheetmusicplus.com (competitor): links: 5,322,596    root domains: 6,149 (worse than our profile!)

musicnotes.com (competitor): links: 6,527,429    root domains: 2,914 (much worse than our profile!)

Am I missing anything?

[TakeshiYoung]

The discrepancy between noindexed/indexed pages is not in itself a problem. However having all those pages will present a challenge to Google, in terms of crawling. Even though the pages won't be indexed, Google will need to spend some of your limited crawl budget crawling all those pages.

Also, to recover from Panda it's necessary to not only noindex duplicate content, but improve your indexed content. That means things like consolidating similar pages into one page, writing unique content for your pages, and getting unique user-generated content such as reviews.

[WesleySmits]

Why would you want to no-index your product pages? They seem like the kind of pages you want to get found on.

There shouldn't be a problem between the amount of index pages VS no-index pages except you won't get found on the no-index ones. Product pages tend to be the kind of pages that you REALLY want to get found on.

I think you should rethink your strategy to recover from the penalties.
Try to find out where exactly the penalties came from and fix the errors in that area of our website.

[SVmedia]

Can't say I've been in that situation, but search engines seem to interpret that tag as an on/off situation.   and I think you probably know that your problems aren't related to or able to be solved by robots meta tags.

You need less fake links.  OSE finds well over half a million links from 3K root domains to your site.  Look at your competitors - a few thousand links from  a handful of domains.

It's a shame because it seems like the internet wanted to make you the authority naturally - You've got a handful of really solid links coming in.  If you could shed the spam somehow you'd be doing a lot better.

So yea, stating the obvious, I know.  best of luck to you and hope the site recovers!