NOINDEX,FOLLOW on product pages
-
Hi
Can I have people's thoughts on something please. We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level. So imagine we have three ranges
Range 1 - A Bird
Range 2 - A Heart
Range 3 - A Flower
Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc. The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower). However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match). Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar. We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call.
So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich. The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages.
Any thoughts on this one?
Gary
-
Thanks for helping me bounce the ideas around. Always valuable comments from SeoMozzers! Have a good day!
-
Yes that's a very good idea. It is much stronger a signal in it's execution than the noindex/follow method given my concerns.
-
OK, thanks for your detailed response.
I am wondering whether I might just have a dynamically generated URL for the "product level" pages, i.e. page.php?id=1, page.php?id=2 etc and then have a canonical tag that is the same across them all. I could then limit the product pages to those that are genuinely different in some way. That way, I can avoid the noindex,follow issue, have very few duplicate product pages and avoid Panda related issues. Sound sensible?
Gary
-
The issue with a high volume of noindex,follow pages is understanding intent, and potentially having the message be confused. "We have x pages with noindex, follow - meaning "we don't think these pages are important enough to index, but the links on them are". Except if those links exist elsewhere, on enough indexed pages, what's the point being made?
Is it an attempt to artificially boost the signals for those pages that are linked by saying "look at all these extra links we have pointing to these other pages"? That's the concern especially since the implementation of over-optimization factors in algorithms. While it may not be Google's intent to devalue a site due to innocent behavior, their ability algorithmically to understand is limited.
Over the past year and a half I've seen more and more situations where Google's many layers of algorithmic decisions have resulted in client sites suffering because of a lack of human review that can determine "this was not an intentional attempt to over-optimize". I've seen it with internal linking, I've seen it when use of noindex/follow conflicts with canonical signals, and I've seen it where either of those conflicts with robots.txt instructions.
While no single case is guaranteed to be problematic (due to hundreds of factors being evaluated across multiple algorithms), at the same time, as a professional audit consultant I am not comfortable enough to then leave out the consideration where no single case is guaranteed to be safe either. Thus, my opinion of "best practices" is to "avoid potentially significant problems".
-
Alan Thanks for this. Can I check I understand your comments. Are u suggesting that a large number of noindex, follow pages causes google to lose interest in following the links from those pages? Do u know this to be the case through an empirical study? I like your suggestion of integrating the product purchase onto the category pages. I agree that would be ideal but the products themselves have alot of options and some are designed online so it could end up quite complex. Food for thought though as it would be a good solution SEO wise. I'm just a little concerned on a user ability front. Gary
-
One alternate method would be to integrate the products onto their individual "range" pages, with purchase capability and options right there. You'd need to ensure the overwhelming majority of those pages is still unique, however it would avoid potential confusion that comes from "noindex,follow" being used on a massive scale, which can itself be problematic. (Google needs to understand WHY there are so many nonidex pages, and what unique links exist on those pages that you want the crawler to follow them for).
-
Sounds like it makes sense and that you have thought it out. If the category pages are conversion friendly, sounds like it can be done. But if there is a way you can get the product pages to have unique content I would personally prefer the product pages to rank. By doing what you are suggesting you're putting the point of purchase a click further away, which isn't the end of the world.
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
-
Product Listings - is it worth indexing the whole product catalogue?
I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version. After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess. I have a couple of thoughts. My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s. My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages. Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!
Technical SEO | | Savage-Solutions0 -
Effect of 302 redirects from empty parent page to sub page
A client's website has links to their service pages which then redirect (302 through a php "Location:" header) to that service's first sub-page. For example, our-services/service-x redirects to our-services/service-x/about-service-x I can only think this has been done because there is no actual content for the parent page and to maintain some kind of structure for navigation and URLs. Really there's no reason why the 'about-service-x' page can't be removed and its content transferred to the main 'service-x' page. Then the redirects can be removed also - it's not how a 302 should be used for a start. I'm just wondering what kind of effect this current redirection has on SEO, as I know 302s don't pass any link juice? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | driftingbass0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
'No Follow' and 'Do Follow' links when using WordPress plugins
Hi all I hope someone can help me out with the following question in regards to 'no follow' and 'do follow' links in combination with WordPress plugins. Some plugins that deal with links i.e. link masking or SEO plugins do give you the option to 'not follow' links. Can someone speak from experience that this does actually work?? It's really quite stupid, but only occurred to me that when using the FireFox add on 'NoDoFollow' as well as looking at the SEOmoz link profile of course, 95% of my links are actually marked as FOLLOW, while the opposite should be the case. For example I mark about 90% of outgoing links as no follow within a link masking plugin. Well, why would WordPress plugins give you the option to mark links as no follow in the first place when they do in fact appear as follow for search engines and SEOmoz? Is this a WordPress thing or whatnot? Maybe they are in fact no follow, and the information supplied by SEO tools comes from the basic HTML structure analysis. I don't know... This really got me worried. Hope someone can shed a light. All the best and many thanks for your answers!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Wordpress html page
Hi, WE are designing new agency site which contain from then 100 page. Which URL is best excample.com/about/ or excample/about.html excample.com/service/ or excample/service.html
Technical SEO | | srinathk0 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Getting on to page 1 again
I have recently set up a website, and as soon as it got indexed by google, I ranked on the first page at number 10... However, Ever since I have started trying to backlink.. the more I seem to do, the more I seem to drop down the rankings! The same for both Bing and Yahoo... I am really not sure what the problem is. My site is www.arilinegamesatc.com, and the ranking words are airline games and airline game. Any help woudl be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rolls1230 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10