Should I block non-informative pages from Google's index?
-
Our site has about 1000 pages indexed, and the vast majority of them are not useful, and/or contain little content. Some of these are:
-Galleries
-Pages of images with no text except for navigation
-Popup windows that contain further information about something but contain no navigation, and sometimes only a couple sentencesMy question is whether or not I should put a noindex in the meta tags.
I think it would be good because the ratio of quality to low quality pages right now is not good at all.
I am apprehensive because if I'm blocking more than half my site from Google, won't Google see that as a suspicious or bad practice?
-
To the spiders, would the content in the lightbox be considered on the page?
-
I would discriminate these pages on the basis of income or search engine traffic rather than use their informativeness.
I have semiinformative pages that pull lots of traffic and make lots of money - and informative pages that make next to nothing.
-
More a technical answer than SEO-specific, but you could place the pop up content in a lightbox similar to your gallery items with a script like http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/, colorbox, etc. These will allow you to lightbox on page content in addition to just photos.
So you could technically have the price table displayed in the page for non-javascript enabled clients, and the lightbox script would show it when clicked, and you wouldn't have to worry about pop-up blockers or having the popup content be a separate page.
-
I know PR shaping is most commonly done with nofollows but the same core principle holds: you don't want the spiders to do something out of fear that you're "diluting" the site's value. Doing it with noindex is just as bad as nofollow, if not worse.
-
When it comes to popups, keep in mind that some users' popup blockers might prevent these from even loading. As is, I don't think it matters much whether you noindex these price list pages or not. You certainly could, as they're not going to appear in any search result, and they're not going to attract links.
I would play with ways to improve the user experience, but putting the large tables on the page probably isn't the way to do that. To me, I think a better option would be (somewhere above the fold) allowing the user to select the type (plain/patched/etc.) quantity, and other variables. They would then get a price quote (as on the bottom of the page), along with a button to continue the checkout process or otherwise continue to the next step. I'd also display the original price per item crossed out, the phrase "bulk discounts" somewhere close, and then the new price per item.
Telling people what they need to do next (it took me a while to find where to buy) and simplifying the pricing at the same time could help a lot. I also noticed that the price quote on the contact page seems to be loading inside the same cramped frame.
-
Hi there,
Sorry I didn't see this when I posted. PR sculpting generally refers to the practice of using internal nofollows - which I'm not a fan of either, not least because it doesn't work. I also agree that pages that users could find useful should generally remain in the index.
-
Thanks for that great information. This is a good example of what I'm taking about:
http://www.stadriemblems.com/scouting/neckerchiefs/index.htm
Under "Plain Neckerchief" click on "view pricelist" or "color chart"
So, you think a better practice would be to just include that pricelist on the same page instead?
-
Hi Marisa,
To determine which pages should be noindexed, first ask yourself first whether a user would want to land on the URL in question. Second, is the URL receiving traffic as an organic landing page right now? Third, does the content serve a purpose to the user? Does it need to exist?
If the answer to all of the above questions is "no," then go ahead and noindex the page. If you answer yes to one of the above, some evaluation is in order. Can you add content, improve the navigation and appearance, or make the page more useful rather than noindexing it?
Generally you can enhance gallery pages for search engines and users by labeling/captioning the images and making sure the alt text is in order. On category pages, add some content, label products, and provide them with a next action.
Do the popups contain useful, non-repeating, or important info? If so, can the content be placed on the page somewhere instead? The only way I would use a popup and noindex it is if the content in the popup is optional and duplicated, such as the often-seen "What's This?" that explains a field or term that is repeated across the site, and each instance makes a new URL.
I've never heard of anyone running into problems with Google for noindexing too much stuff. You're essentially just telling them that the page is not good for users to find. You will, however, tend to improve organic traffic and user experience by making each page useful and adding an appropriate amount of content.
Hope that helps,
Carson
-
I'm not a fan of this (commonly called page rank shaping). First, you're trying to tell Google what to index and what to ignore. Second, how do you know those pages have no value? What if I found an image in your gallery and linked to it off my blog? Now you're missing out on link juice. It might not be viewed as suspicious, but it won't help your site any.
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
-
Linking from high ranking sub domain pages to less ranking main domain pages to benefit latter
Hi all, We have our product guide pages on sub domain which are years old, so have some backlinks and high ranking for the beand related queries. Now we created new guide pages on our main website and we want these new pages to rank top beating the old pages from sub domain. Again we can't deindex or rel canonical to solve the issue as there are some part of users still using the old pages. We are planning to give a link from every old page of sub domain to same new page on main domain. Will this linking increases the authority of new pages technically and helps in ranking better? Like we give a link to "Moz guide 1" page to "Moz guide 2" page to rank latter better. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google Search Analytics desktop site to losing page position compared to the mobile version of the site
Looking at Google Search Analytics page position by device. The desktop version has seen a dramatic drop in the last 60 days compared to the mobile site. Could this be caused by mobile first indexing? Has Google had any releases that might have caused this?
Algorithm Updates | | merch_zzounds0 -
Any suggestions why I would rank 1 on google and be on 3rd page for bing/yahoo?
Currently the site I'm working on ranks very well on google rankings but then when we cross reference into yahoo and bing we are basically in the graveyard of keywords. (bottom of 3rd page). Why would that be? Any suggestions or things I can do to fix this or troubleshoot it? Here are some things I can think of that might affect this but not sure. 1. our sitemap hasn't been updated in months and URL changes have been made 2. Onsite for yahoo and bing is different from google? 3. Bing is just terrible in general? 4. Inbound links? This one doesn't make sense though unless the search engines rank links in different ways. All jokes aside I would really appreciate any help as currently the few top ranked keywords we have are about 30% of our organic traffic and would have a huge affect on the company if we were able to rank as we should across all platforms. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | JemJemCertified0 -
Should my canonical tags point to the category page or the filter result page?
Hi Moz, I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com. Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com? I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order. What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site? Thanks for reading!
Algorithm Updates | | DA20130 -
Reasons for a sharp decline in pages crawled
Hello! I have a site I've been tracking using Moz since July. The site is mainly stagnant with some on page content updates. Starting the first week of December, Moz crawler diagnostics showed that the number of pages crawled decreased from 300 to 100 in a week. So did the number of errors through. So crawler issues went from 275 to 50 and total pages crawled went from 190 to 125 in a week and this number has stayed the same for the last 5 weeks. Are the drops a red flag? Or is it ok since errors decreased also? Has anyone else experienced this and found an issue? FYI: sitemap exists and is submitted via webmaster tools. GWT shows no crawler errors nor blocked URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | Symmetri0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0 -
Google Update on the 6th July
Hi Mozzers, Has anyone noticed a Google update on the 6th July? A price comparison site I optimise has fallen off the SERPs for most generic terms, however still getting traffic for longer tail phrases. Cheers Aran
Algorithm Updates | | Entrusteddev0 -
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey1