Removing massive number of no index follow page that are not crawled
-
Hi,
We have stackable filters on some of our pages (ie: ?filter1=a&filter2=b&etc.). Those stacked filters pages are "noindex, follow". They were created in order to facilitate the indexation of the item listed in them.
After analysing the logs we know that the search engines do not crawl those stacked filter pages.
Does blocking those pages (by loading their link in AJAX for example) would help our crawl rate or not? In order words does removing links that are already not crawled help the crawl rate of the rest of our pages?
My assumption here is that SE see those links but discard them because those pages are too deep in our architecture and by removing them we would help SE focus on the rest of our page. We don't want to waste our efforts removing those links if there will be no impact.
Thanks
-
Personally I don't agree with setting internal filter URLs to nofollow. I set noindex as you have done and add the filter attributes to the Search Console > Crawl > URL Parameters.
For the option "Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl?" you can set "No URLs" (if the filters are uniform throughout the site).
"No URLs: Googlebot won't crawl any URLs containing this parameter. This is useful if your site uses many parameters to filter content. For example, telling Googlebot not to crawl URLs with less significant parameters such as
pricefrom
andpriceto
(likehttp://www.examples.com/search?category=shoe&brand=nike&color=red&size=5&pricefrom=10&priceto=1000
) can prevent the unnecessary crawling of content already available from a page without those parameters (likehttp://www.examples.com/search?category=shoe&brand=nike&color=red&size=5)"
-
noindex means that crawlers can still visit the page (using crawl budget). You would need to link to those pages using a nofollow tag + block via robots.txt to prevent crawlers from accessing them.
Overall, if those pages aren't being crawled currently, then they aren't affecting your crawl budget since they aren't being visited. However, if you build more authority to your website, your crawl budget will grow so crawlers might start visiting those pages 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
-
Password Protected Page(s) Indexed
Hi, I am wondering if my website can get a penalty if some password protected pages are showing up when I search on google: site:www.example.com/sub-group/pass-word-protected-page That shows that my password protected page was indexed either before or after adding the password protection. I've seen people suggest no indexing the page. Is that the best method to take care of this? What if we are planning on pushing the page live later on? All of these pages have no title tag, meta description, image alt text, etc. Should I add them for each page? I am wondering what is the best step, especially if we are planning on pushing the page(s) live. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
To No Follow, or to Not No Follow?
So one of the big issues facing my website is that Moz seems to be picking up all of the ''Search'' and ''Tag'' pages, which is causing duplicate content. I cannot see any use for Google to index these pages, so is it better to create a No-Follow rule specific to Search and Tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How to check if the page is indexable for SEs?
Hi, I'm building the extension for Chrome, which should show me the status of the indexability of the page I'm on. So, I need to know all the methods to check if the page has the potential to be crawled and indexed by a Search Engines. I've come up with a few methods: Check the URL in robots.txt file (if it's not disallowed) Check page metas (if there are not noindex meta) Check if page is the same for unregistered users (for those pages only available for registered users of the site) Are there any more methods to check if a particular page is indexable (or not closed for indexation) by Search Engines? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boostaman0 -
Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi, I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice? Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too. Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Indexing a several millions pages new website
Hello everyone, I am currently working for a huge classified website who will be released in France in September 2013. The website will have up to 10 millions pages. I know the indexing of a website of such size should be done step by step and not in only one time to avoid a long sandbox risk and to have more control about it. Do you guys have any recommandations or good practices for such a task ? Maybe some personal experience you might have had ? The website will cover about 300 jobs : In all region (= 300 * 22 pages) In all departments (= 300 * 101 pages) In all cities (= 300 * 37 000 pages) Do you think it would be wiser to index couple of jobs by couple of jobs (for instance 10 jobs every week) or to index with levels of pages (for exemple, 1st step with jobs in region, 2nd step with jobs in departements, etc.) ? More generally speaking, how would you do in order to avoid penalties from Google and to index the whole site as fast as possible ? One more specification : we'll rely on a (big ?) press followup and on a linking job that still has to be determined yet. Thanks for your help ! Best Regards, Raphael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pureshore0 -
Page Indexed but not Cached
A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0