Noindex user profile
-
I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions:
- What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm.
- How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive?
- When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed
- Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity)
- (unique) Profile picture
- (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks or user's own site.
- Embedded Google Map
Thanks!
-
The one thing I would add to your list of criteria, if you choose to go that route, is to look at Google Analytics landing pages and make sure the individual profiles don't any inbound search traffic.
-
The gain would be that you don't index a bunch of URLs on your site that contain essentially similar/thin content. I wouldn't necessarily count those that do bring in long tail traffic as ones you'd want to noindex. Things will return to normal once you remove the noindex, but unless you have decent links pointing to those profiles, it may take up to numerous months to for them to be recrawled. I'd weigh most heavily links (followed or no followed) to the profiles from decent sites, as well as activity that shows on the profile page. The rest I wouldn't consider in the threshold calculation.
-
1. unless you have a big thin content problem there is no gain
2. completely reversible, just remove and wait
3. you will have to decide, you seem like you are on the right track.
4. Question you should have asked, is there any downside to no-indexing these pages, Answer Yes there is, all links pointing to a no-indexed page will leak all their link juice, noindex is a last resort, I have never used.
if you must noindex a page, do it with a meta no-index,follow tag, note that was "follow", not "no-follow", then your link juice will flow into the page and back out again.
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
-
noindex, follow for thin content advice
Hello there We struggle with a number of none indexed pages. I want to ask your professional opinion. The robots tag is set up as follows, <meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow' /> those pages haven`t got any value but contain valuable pages.
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Is setting up robots name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" / would be a good solution? Here is the page https://www.lrbconsulting.co.uk/tag/enforcement/page/2/
with noindex robot tag. Please let me know what you think. #noindex, follow for thin content
#noindex, follow
#meta robots set up0 -
NoIndex tag, canonical tag or automatically generated H1's for automatically generated enquiry pages?
What would be better for automatically generated accommodation enquiry pages for a travel company? NoIndex tag, canonical tag, automatically generated H1's or another solution? This is the homepage: https://www.discoverqueensland.com.au/ You would enquire from a page like this: https://www.discoverqueensland.com.au/accommodation/sunshine-coast/twin-waters/the-sebel-twin-waters This is the enquiry form: https://www.discoverqueensland.com.au/accommodation-enquiry.php?name=The+Sebel+Twin+Waters®ion_name=Sunshine+Coast
Technical SEO | | Kim_Lazaro0 -
All images are noindex will opening this at once be an issue?
Hi, All images are noindex will opening this at once be an issue? Not sure how a few months ago all my images were set as noindex which i realized last week. We have 20K images which were indexed fine but now when i check Site:sitename it shows 10 or 12 and the inspect element via Chrome i see the noindex is set for all images. We have been renaming the images and adding ALT tags for most of them and would it be an issue if we change the noindex in one shot or should we do them few at a time? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Why use noindex, follow vs rel next/prev
Look at what www.shutterstock.com/cat-26p3-Abstract.html does with their search results page 3 for 'Abstract' - same for page 2-N in the paginated series. | name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"> |
Technical SEO | | jrjames83
| | Why is this a better alternative then using the next/prev, per Google's official statement on pagination? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 Which doesn't even mention this as an option. Any ideas? Does this improve the odds of the first page in the paginated series ranking for the target term? There can't be a 'view all page' because there are simply too many items. Jeff0 -
Noindex vs. page removal - Panda recovery
I'm wondering whether there is a consensus within the SEO community as to whether noindexing pages vs. actually removing pages is different from Google Pandas perspective?Does noindexing pages have less value when removing poor quality content than physically removing ie. either 301ing or 404ing the page being removed and removing the links to it from the site? I presume that removing pages has a positive impact on the amount of link juice that gets to some of the remaining pages deeper into the site, but I also presume this doesn't have any direct impact on the Panda algorithm? Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, and corrections on my assumptions 🙂
Technical SEO | | agencycentral0 -
Competitors Dodgy Link Profile - How to handle?
Hi All, One of my competitors doesn't seem to mind collecting links with no relevance and over optimisation of anchor text also leaves me scratching my head as to ho wit's possible for them to still get the rankings they do. My question is how do I handle them from a competitive point of view? Do I pay for a batch of poor links to topple this competitor? Or do I bide my time? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mulith0 -
Spam links on my Backlink Profile
Recently after checking my backlink profile, my site has attracted quite a few spam backlinks with the anchor text written in Asian characters. We don't do any black-hat tactics and have remained clean in our process, as well as not submitted our site to any spam directories, yet we still have these foreign links. Any thoughts on how to get rid of these or stop these from occurring?
Technical SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
Mask links with JS that point to noindex'ed paged
Hi, in an effort to prepare our page for the Panda we dramatically reduced the number of pages that can be indexed (from 100k down to 4k). All the remaining pages are being equipped with unique and valuable content. We still have the other pages around, since they represent searches with filter combination which we deem are less interesting to the majority of users (hence they are not indexed). So I am wondering if we should mask links to these non-indexed pages with JS, such that Link-Juice doesn't get lost to those. Currently the targeted pages are non-index via "noindex, follow" - we might de-index them with robots.txt though, if the "site:" query doesn't show improvements. Thanks, Sebastian
Technical SEO | | derderko0