Dealing with thin comment
-
Hi again! I've got a site where around 30% of URLs have less than 250 words of copy. It's big though, so that is roughly 5,000 pages. It's an ecommerce site and not feasible to bulk up each one. I'm wondering if noindexing them is a good idea, and then measuring if this has an effect on organic search?
-
Thanks guys! We'e starting to add more content to each page, looks like the only way!
-
Does your competition have more content for these products?
If so, you need to ramp it up.
Either way, no-indexing them is not going to do any good.
-
Hi Blink
What would you be hoping to gain by de indexing these pages?
-
The size of your site is important. The value these pages have as far as bulking your site up is important. If you no index them, you will significantly reduce the size of your site, which can effect your ability to rank on other pages as well. No indexing them is not best practice, and will cause more harm than good.
These pages aren't hurting your site by not ranking. They might rank for terms you aren't tracking also. The pages probably have some authority and links, getting rid of that will definitely be detrimental.
-
Hi! I agree that they won't rank, but most aren't now anyway. I'm more concerned that they are pulling everything else down. By noindexing them, I can at least see if that is the problem/.
-
If you no index the pages they will never rank. The bots will not be able to crawl them so they will essentially be useless.
Are these product pages? The best way to get content on these pages is through user generated reviews. That is the best way to accomplish adding content without spending a ton of time writing copy.
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
-
How to deal with parameter URLs as primary internal links and not canonicals? Weird situation inside...
So I have a weird situation, and I was hoping someone could help. This is for an ecommerce site. 1. Parameters are used to tie Product Detail Pages (PDP) to individual categories. This is represented in the breadcrumbs for the page and the use of a categoryid. One product can thus be included in multiple categories. 2. All of these PDPs have a canonical that does not include the parameter / categoryid. 3. With very few exceptions, the canonical URL for the PDPs are not linked to. Instead, the parameter URL is to tie it to a specific category. This is done primarily for the sake of breadcrumbs it seems. One of the big issues we've been having is the canonical URLs not being indexed for a lot of the products. In some instances, the canonicals _are _indexed alongside parameters, or just parameter URLs are indexed. It's all very...mixed up, I suppose. My theory is that the majority of canonical URLs not being linked to anywhere on the site is forcing Google to put preference on the internal link instead. My problem? **I have no idea what to recommend to the client (who will not change the parameter setup). ** One of our Technical SEOs recommended we "Use cookies instead of parameters to assign breadcrumbs based on how the PDP is accessed." I have no experience this. So....yeah. Any thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
Good day to you Mozers, I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced. This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified. Examples are: Every PoS could have a different price on their product Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change. I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag. i.e: https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential. Question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one. I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on? I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted. Thank you in advance,1 -
Would you consider this thin content?
Just wondering what the community thinks about the following URLS and whether they are essentially thin content that should be handled through a canonical, noindex or a parameter filtering system: https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x1-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x2-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x3-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x4-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x5-popup-exhibition-stand
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColinDocherty0 -
Pros & Cons Of Closing Forum Discussions To New Comments
I work with a site that gets lots of members and conversions from its specialty interest community forum out of organic search. The site has been around for a number of years and still has many forum pages that do well in search that are 5+ years old. Some of these discussions may have dozens of comments and a few have thousand words. The option has been floated to end accepting new comments on specific discussions at some point. I can see the negatives, such as folks coming out of search and wanting to register to comment, but not be able to... if we closed the discussion to new comments. I've always assumed that new comments may freshen up a page a little organic search-wise, but honestly don't know how much that matters. Are there any good reasons to close a discussion to new comments? Related question, what do you think is the optimum qty of unique text before paginating? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945011 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Your advice regarding thin content would be really appreciated
Hi guys, I have embarked on a new site creation. The site is being created from scratch and very custom. Basically the site allows people to review certain products and services. If each review completed by users is seen as a seperate page by google ... is this considered deceptive or a likelihood of being slapped with a thin content penalty? Basically 1 product may have hundreds of reviews naturally over time. Some may be really short and some may be longer. the reason why i would like the user reviews to be seen as seperate pages is because I want google to understand that people are regularly interacting with the main content page. Any advice in this area would be really appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irdeto0 -
What enterprise level commenting system do you recommend?
Must be SEO "compliant". User friendly Must be customizable Possibly extendible
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmteamseo0 -
How to deal with 1 product in 1 country and 3 languages?
After reading multiple posts on dealing with multilanguage sites (also checked http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=12a5507889c20461&hl=en), I still haven't got an answer to a very specific question I have. Please allow me to give some background:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TruvoDirectories
I'm working for the official Belgian Yellow Pages (part of Truvo), and as you might know in Belgium, we have to deal with 3 official languages (BE-nl, BE-fr, BE-de | the latter is out of scope for this question) and on top of that we also have a large international audience (BE-en). Furthermore, Belgium is very small, meaning that someone living in the French part of Belgium (ex. Liège) easily might look for information in the Dutch part of Belgium (ex. Antwerpen) without having to switch websites/language. Since 1968 (http://info.truvo.be/en/our-company/) we have established 3 different brands, each brand is adapted to a language, each has a clear language specific connotation:
for the BE-nl market: we have the brand "gouden gids"
for the BE-fr market: we have the brand "pages dor"
for the BE-en market we have the brand "golden pages" Logically, this results in 3 websites: www.goudengids.be, www.pagesdor.be, www.goldenpages.be each serving a specific language and containing specific language messages and functionalities, but, off course, serving a part of the content that is similar for all websites regardless of the language.
So we do have following links ex.
http://www.goudengids.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.pagesdor.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.goldenpages.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/ When I want to stick with the separate brands for the same content, how do I make sure that Google shows the desired url when searching in resp. google.be (dutch), google.be (french) google.be (english)? Kind Regards0