Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept?

If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag?

If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?

[Everett]

Sometimes you need to leave the crawl path open to Googlebot so they can get around the site. A specific example that may be relevant to you is in pagination. If you have 100 products and are only showing 10 on the first page Google will not be able to reach the other 90 product pages as easily if you block paginated pages in the robots.txt. Better options in such a case might be a robots noindex,follow meta tag, rel next/prev tags, or a "view all" canonical page.

If these pages aren't important to the crawlability of the site, such as internal search results, you could block them in the robots.txt file with little or no issues, and it would help to get them out of the index. If they aren't useful for spiders or users, or anything else, then yes you can and should probably let them 404, rather than blocking.

Yes, I do like to leave the blocked or removed URLs in the sitemap for just a little while to ensure Googlebog revisits them and sees the noindex tag, 404 error code, 301 redirect, or whatever it is they need to see in order to update their index. They'll get there on their own eventually, but I find it faster to send them to the pages myself. Once Googlebot visits these URls and updates their index you should remove them from your sitemaps.

[Devanur-Rafi]

If you want to noindex any of your pages, there is no way that Google or any other search engines will think something is fishy. Its up to the webmaster to decide what and what not to get indexed from his website. If you implement page level noindex, the link juice will still flow to the page but if you also have nofollow along with noindex, the link juice will flow to the page but will be contained on the page itself and will not be passed on the links that flow out of that page.

I conclude by saying, there is nothing wrong in making the pages non-indexable.

Here is an interesting discussion related to this on Moz:

http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Devanur,

What I am asking is if the robots/google will view it as a negative thing for noindexing pages and still trying to pass the link juice, even though the pages aren't even viewable to the front end user.

[Devanur-Rafi]

If you wish not to show these pages even to the front end user, you can just block them using the page level robots meta tag so that these pages will never be indexed by the search engines as well.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Yes, but what if these pages aren't even viewable to the front end user?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi there, it is a very good idea to block any and all the pages that do not provide any useful content to the visitors and especially when they are very thin content wise. So the idea is to keep away low quality content that does no good to the visitor, from the Internet. Search engines would love every webmaster doing so.

However, sometimes, no matter how thin the content is on some pages, they still provide good information to the visitors and serve the purpose of the visit. In this case, you can provide contextual links to those pages and add the nofollow attribute to the link. Of course you should ideally be implementing the page level blocking using the robots meta tag on those pages. I do not think you should return a 404 on these pages as there is no need to do so. When a page level blocking is implemented, Google will not index the blocked content even if it finds a third party reference to it from elsewhere on the Internet.

If you have implemented the page level noindex using the robots meta tag, there is no need to go for a sitemap with these URLs. With noindex in place, as I mentioned above, Google will not index the content even if it discovers the page using a reference from anywhere on the Internet.

Hope it helps my friend.Best,Devanur Rafi