Easy Question: regarding no index meta tag vs robot.txt
-
This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea?
I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best.
**DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them?
If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right?
ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option?
**301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think?
DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.
-
Hello Santaur,
I'm afraid this question isn't as easy as you may have thought at first. It really depends on what is on the pages in those two directories, what they're being used for, who visits them, etc... Certainly removing them altogether wouldn't be as terrible as some people might think IF those pages are of poor quality, have no external links, and very few - if any - visitors. It sounds to me that you might need a "Content Audit" wherein the entire site is crawled, using a tool like Screaming Frog, and then relevant metrics are pulled for those pages (e.g. Google Analytics visits, Moz Page Authority and external links...) so you can look at them and make informed decisions about which pages to improve, remove or leave as-is.
Any page that gets "removed" will leave you with another choice: Allow to 404/410 or 301 redirect. That decision should be easy to make on a page-by-page basis after the content audit because you will be able to see which ones have external links and/or visitors within the time period specified (e.g. 90 days). Pages that you have decided to "Remove" which have no external links and no visits in 90 days can probably just be deleted. The others can be 301 redirected to a more appropriate page, such as the blog home page, top level category page, similar page or - if all else fails - the site home page.
Of course any page that gets removed, whether it redirects or 404s/410s should have all internal links updated as soon as possible. The scan you did with Screaming Frog during the content audit will provide you with all internal links pointing to each URL, which should speed up that process for you considerably.
Good luck!
-
I would certainly think twice about removing those pages as they're in most cases of value for both your SEO as your users. If you would decide to go this way and to have them removed I would redirect all the pages belonging to these subdirectories to another page (let's say the homepage). Although you have a limited amount of traffic there you still want to make sure that the people who land on these pages get redirected to a page that does exist.
-
Are you sure you want to do this? You say 80% of the site consists of gallery and blog pages. You also say there are a lot of internal links to those pages. Are you perhaps under estimating the value of long- tail traffic
To answer your specific question, yes link juice will still pass thru to the pages that are no indexed. They just won't ever show up in search results. Using robots noindex gets you the same result. 301 redirects will pass all your link juice back to the home page, but makes for a lousy user experience. Same for deleting pages.
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
-
Meta HTML tag code
I have been instructed by Moz that I have some missing meta description tags; however, this is what comes up when I searched for more help on this site: "The proper coding for a meta HTML tag is These Meta descriptions can be nested anywhere in the element." Obviously the actual coding is missing... so can anyone tell me what the proper coding for a meta HTML tag is? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | marissaRT0 -
Sub Domains and Robot.txt files...
This is going to seem like a stupid question, and perhaps it is but I am pulling out what little hair I have left. I have a sub level domain on which a website sits. The Main domain has a robots.txt file that disallows all robots. It has been two weeks, I submitted the sitemap through webmaster tools and still, Google has not indexed the sub domain website. My question is, could the robots.txt file on the main domain be affecting the crawlability of the website on the sub domain? I wouldn't have thought so but I can find nothing else. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Pages not being indexed
Hi Moz community! We have a client for whom some of their pages are not ranking at all, although they do seem to be indexed by Google. They are in the real estate sector and this is an example of one: http://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/102-iveagh-gardens-crumlin-dublin-12/2289087 In the example above if you search for "102 iveagh gardens crumlin" on Google then they do not rank for that exact URL above - it's a similar one. And this page has been live for quite some time. Anyone got any thoughts on what might be at play here? Kind regards. Gavin
Technical SEO | | IrishTimes0 -
Removing robots.txt on WordPress site problem
Hi..am a little confused since I ticked the box in WordPress to allow search engines to now crawl my site (previously asked for them not to) but Google webmaster tools is telling me I still have robots.txt blocking them so am unable to submit the sitemap. Checked source code and the robots instruction has gone so a little lost. Any ideas please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0 -
Google (GWT) says my homepage and posts are blocked by Robots.txt
I guys.. I have a very annoying issue.. My Wordpress-blog over at www.Trovatten.com has some indexation-problems.. Google Webmaster Tools data:
Technical SEO | | FrederikTrovatten22
GWT says the following: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt." and shows me my homepage and my blogposts.. This is my Robots.txt: http://www.trovatten.com/robots.txt
"User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ Do you have any idea why it says that the URL's are being blocked by robots.txt when that looks how it should?
I've read a couple of places that it can be because of a Wordpress Plugin that is creating a virtuel robots.txt, but I can't validate it.. 1. I have set WP-Privacy to crawl my site
2. I have deactivated all WP-plugins and I still get same GWT-Warnings. Looking forward to hear if you have an idea that might work!0 -
Supplementary Index
Hi - Is there a way of checking whether pages are in the supplementary index? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Robots.txt question
Hello, What does the following command mean - User-agent: * Allow: / Does it mean that we are blocking all spiders ? Is Allow supported in robots.txt ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90