Which pages should I index or have in my XML sitemap?
-
Hi there,
my website is ConcertHotels.com - a site which helps users find hotels close to concert venues. I have a hotel listing page for every concert venue on my site - about 12,000 of them I think (and the same for nearby restaurants).
e.g.
https://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484
Each of these pages list the nearby hotels to that concert venue. Users clicking on the individual hotel are brought through to a hotel (product) page e.g.
https://www.concerthotels.com/hotel/the-new-yorker-a-wyndham-hotel/136818
I made a decision years ago to noindex all of the /hotel/ pages since they don't have a huge amount of unique content and aren't the pages I'd like my users to land on . The primary pages on my site are the /venue-hotels/ listing pages.
I have similar pages for nearby restaurants, so there are approximately 12,000 venue-restaurants pages, again, one listing page for each concert venue.
However, while all of these pages are potentially money-earners, in reality, the vast majority of subsequent hotel bookings have come from a fraction of the 12,000 venues. I would say 2000 venues are key money earning pages, a further 6000 have generated income of a low level, and 4000 are yet to generate income.
I have a few related questions:
-
Although there is potential for any of these pages to generate revenue, should I be brutal and simply delete a venue if it hasn't generated revenue within a time period, and just accept that, while it "could" be useful, it hasn't proven to be and isn't worth the link equity. Or should I noindex these "poorly performing pages"?
-
Should all 12,000 pages be listed in my XML sitemap? Or simply the ones that are generating revenue, or perhaps just the ones that have generated significant revenue in the past and have proved to be most important to my business?
Thanks
Mike
-
-
Hi Chris,
thank you very much for your help and suggestions, it is much appreciated. I'll de-noindex a handful of my biggest artist pages and see if they attract much interest from users.
As for the /venues/ pages, these have been fairly neglected to date, so perhaps I need to really focus my attention on them, as you say, and bring in some cross referencing.
I have also wondered whether allowing companies to create pages dedicated to their events would be a good route to take - it could be done with ease, so perhaps I should investigate further.
Again, thanks very much, and hopefully I can report back with good news at some point.
Best wishes
Mike
-
I think they should be indexed, but keyword research should shed light on this topic for you. It will let you know if your audience is searching for those things and in what numbers. Even as they are, though, they might make sufficient landing pages for google. You could de-noindex a group of those pages at a time, starting with the ones most likely to be popular and see how google treats them. I think I'd go that route rather than release them into the wild all at once.
To me, the pages with the most interesting potential are the /venues/ pages like /venues/md-concert-venues/a, for example. I think the potential lies in populating them with venue grouping, upcoming artists grouping, and state. How hard would it be to populate an area above the black line with all/some of the upcoming artists playing near the hotels that show on that page. That 3-way cross referencing would make those pages fairly unique on the web and unique on your site and would give google a number of good reasons to send traffic there. They'd probably be good pages to publish advertising on, too.
Also wondering if there is a thing such as "licensing" dedicated pages out to companies/hotels that are putting on non-musical events like conferences, etc, so they can link to a kind of pre-fab hotels-close-by page up for their attendees?
-
Thanks Chris,
appreciate your comments. Google in indexing a high percentage of the key pages, and does not have any noindex pages indexed. Pages are loading at a decent speed. And only indexed pages are in the sitemap. So perhaps the non-performing pages are not something I should be particularly concerned about, especially they don't necessarily take up much of my time. I guess if I start to run into issues with overall site speed then perhaps then is is the time to consider whether they should continue to be listed. So perhaps, you're right, it's more of a business decision, rather than an SEO one.
I have a further question if you don't mind, which is related but I think is an SEO one. I have a large number of /artist/ pages - these are pages that list which venues a particular artist is performing at, and allows a user to then check hotel availability for the specific venue and date they will be attending. At the minute the pages are fairly light on content - they just list venues and dates, although I'm planning to start introducing more content in the near future. An example page can be seen here:
https://www.concerthotels.com/artist/hotels-near-guns-n-roses-events/1227
At the minute, I've noindexed every artist page on the site, because I was worried Google would see them as thin pages. But I actually think they are potentially very useful to users, and a powerful landing page for quickly taking a user to the correct venue page with the correct dates for the concert. I also think that not all users will search for "Hotels near Metlife Stadium" - they might instead search for "Hotels for Guns n roses in NJ..." etc etc. so perhaps I can pick up some long tail searches with these additional landing pages.
The question is, should I index these pages?
If the answer to that question is yes..... obviously, artists/bands do a tour and then generally disappear into a recording studio for a year or two - as a result, there will be many /artist/ pages that, for a while, have lots of useful event dates/venues listed, but at the end of the tour, the pages will simply be empty, and no longer useful, at least until the next tour. Would you recommend that such pages are indexed when there are events, but when no future events are listed, I set them to noindex?
Many thanks
Mike
-
Mike,
I'm wondering...is that an SEO question? It sounds like a business decision to me. From what you've said, I don't see any reason for Google to ding you on anything. My only questions would be--Is google indexing all the pages you want it to and does not have your noindex pages indexed? Any bad links coming in? Pages are loading at a decent speed? Oh, and I don't see a reason to have your noindex pages in the the sitemap.
Other than that, if those non-performing page are taking up time that you could be spending on more productive pages or on exploring more productive opportunities, then, again, it's time to put on your CEO cap.
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
-
Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
Hi all Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue. I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Query on Sitemap xml Root Path
Is it compulsory to have sitemap.xml at this path - abcd.com/sitemap.xml? My sitename is abcd.com. Now is it compulsory to have sitemap.xml at this path - abcd.com/sitemap.xml only? a) If i take cnd services where path can be like xyz.com/sitemap.xml and then this sitemap i can submit in robot file so it is fine? b) What will happen here in webmaster tool as in webmaster tool when we submit sitemap by default it gives us domain name like abcd.com and we have to just add /sitemap.xml
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
Why Are Some Pages On A New Domain Not Being Indexed?
Background: A company I am working with recently consolidated content from several existing domains into one new domain. Each of the old domains focused on a vertical and each had a number of product pages and a number of blog pages; these are now in directories on the new domain. For example, what was www.verticaldomainone.com/products/productname is now www.newdomain.com/verticalone/products/product name and the blog posts have moved from www.verticaldomaintwo.com/blog/blogpost to www.newdomain.com/verticaltwo/blog/blogpost. Many of those pages used to rank in the SERPs but they now do not. Investigation so far: Looking at Search Console's crawl stats most of the product pages and blog posts do not appear to be being indexed. This is confirmed by using the site: search modifier, which only returns a couple of products and a couple of blog posts in each vertical. Those pages are not the same as the pages with backlinks pointing directly at them. I've investigated the obvious points without success so far: There are a couple of issues with 301s that I am working with them to rectify but I have checked all pages on the old site and most redirects are in place and working There is currently no HTML or XML sitemap for the new site (this will be put in place soon) but I don't think this is an issue since a few products are being indexed and appearing in SERPs Search Console is returning no crawl errors, manual penalties, or anything else adverse Every product page is linked to from the /course page for the relevant vertical through a followed link. None of the pages have a noindex tag on them and the robots.txt allows all crawlers to access all pages One thing to note is that the site is build using react.js, so all content is within app.js. However this does not appear to affect pages higher up the navigation trees like the /vertical/products pages or the home page. So the question is: "Why might product and blog pages not be indexed on the new domain when they were previously and what can I do about it?"
Technical SEO | | BenjaminMorel0 -
Is there a way to get Google to index more of your pages for SEO ranking?
We have a 100 page website, but Google is only indexing a handful of pages for organic rankings. Is there a way to submit to have more pages considered? I have optimized meta data and get good Moz "on-page graders" or the pages & terms that I am trying to connect....but Google doesn't seem to pick them up for ranking. Any insight would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | JulieALS0 -
How come only 2 pages of my 16 page infographic are being crawled by Moz?
Our Infographic titled "What Is Coaching" was officially launched 5 weeks ago. http://whatiscoaching.erickson.edu/ We set up campaigns in Moz & Google Analytics to track its performance. Moz is reporting No organic traffic and is only crawling 2 of the 16 pages we created. (see first and third attachments) Google Analytics is seeing hundreds of some very strange random pages (see second attachment) Both campaigns are tracking the url above. We have no idea where we've gone wrong. Please help!! 16_pages_seen_in_wordpress.png how_google_analytics_sees_pages.png what_moz_sees.png
Technical SEO | | EricksonCoaching0 -
Should We Index These Category Pages?
Currently we have marked category pages like http://www.yournextshoes.com/celebrities/kim-kardashian/ as follow/noindex as they essentially do not include any original content. On the other hand, for someone searching for Kim Kardashian shoes, it's a highly relevant page as we provide links to all the Kim Kardashian shoe sightings that we have covered. Should we index the category pages or leave them unindexed?
Technical SEO | | Jantaro0 -
Page not being indexed
Hi all, On our site we have a lot of bookmaker reviews, and we are ranking pretty good for most bookmaker names as keywords, however a single bookmaker seems to have been shunned by Google. For a search "betsafe" in Denmark, this page does not appear among the top 50: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe All of our other review pages rank in top 10-20 for the bookmaker name as keyword. What to do if Google has "banned" a page? Best regards, Rasmus
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0