Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. "Noindex, follow" for thin pages?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    "Noindex, follow" for thin pages?

    Technical SEO
    4
    4
    1271
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Europarl_SEO_Team
      Europarl_SEO_Team Subscriber last edited by

      Hey there Mozzers,

      I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow"  on these pages. What do you think?

      Has someone faced this situation before?

      Will appreciate your input!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • paupastorlopez
        paupastorlopez Subscriber last edited by

        +1 to EGOL and Ginaluca. We need more information about that pages.

        In any case, if we are talking about thin content, but if is quality content and it's not duplicated content or oriented-for-SEO content, I would not use noindex for it.

        If we ar talking about empty pages or almost empty pages maybe is better to use noindex, or maybe is better to delete and redirect with 301 this pages.

        I would reduce the internal linking, and maybe put those internal links lower or in places with less visibility. Just that.

        Greetings!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • gfiorelli1
          gfiorelli1 last edited by

          EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.

          That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.

          It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).

          So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.

          p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • EGOL
            EGOL last edited by

            If you want good responses to this question, then post more about these pages (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, purpose of pages, etc.) and more about your site (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, etc.).

            Questions with little information are often ignored by people who might know a lot about the  subject because they don't want to guess, they don't want to think about and write about all possible cases, put their effort into a question when the poster didn't put much of his own effort into explaining.

            Also, who are you?  Owner?  Employee?  SEO?  Are you the guy who put these pages up and didn't put any content on them?  The guy who paid for the skinny content that is currently up there and needs to have input on yanking them down or paying for proper content?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • RocketStats

              "5XX (Server Error)" - How can I fix this?

              Hey Mozers! Moz Crawl tells me I am having an issue with my Wordpress category - it is returning a 5XX error and i'm not sure why? Can anyone help me determine the issue? Crawl Issues and Notices for: http://www.refusedcarfinance.com/news/category/news We found 1 crawler issue(s) for this page. High Priority Issues 1 5XX (Server Error) 5XX errors (e.g., a 503 Service Unavailable error) are shown when a valid request was made by the client, but the server failed to complete the request. This can indicate a problem with the server, and should be investigated and fixed.

              Technical SEO | | RocketStats
              0
            • Webrevolve

              What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?

              I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference? Any one care to help me out? Cheers!

              Technical SEO | | Webrevolve
              0
            • TogetherCare

              Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")

              Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael

              Technical SEO | | TogetherCare
              0
            • reidsteven75

              How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?

              This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched.  These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory".  The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls.   Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.

              Technical SEO | | reidsteven75
              0
            • Jeepster

              Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?

              I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML? I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.

              Technical SEO | | Jeepster
              0
            • agencycentral

              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 | | agencycentral
              0
            • MadeLoud

              Why are pages still showing in SERPs, despite being NOINDEXed for months?

              We have thousands of pages we're trying to have de-indexed in Google for months now.  They've all got . But they simply will not go away in the SERPs. Here is just one example.... http://bitly.com/VutCFiIf you search this URL in Google, you will see that it is indexed, yet it's had  for many months.  This is just one example for thousands of pages, that will not get de-indexed.  Am I missing something here?  Does it have to do with using content="none" instead of content="noindex, follow"? Any help is very much appreciated.

              Technical SEO | | MadeLoud
              0
            • tdsnet

              301 for "index.php" in Web.config?

              Hi there, I'm trying to create a 301 redirect for the file "index.php" but I keep getting a "fail to redirect" message in Firefox whenever I insert it into the Web.config file. <location path="index.php"></location> Is there anyway around this? Thanks for any help According to Open Site Explorer, there are about 500 links to my index file but it only has a 302 status so will not be passing link juice.

              Technical SEO | | tdsnet
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.