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
-
Need only tens of pages to be indexed out of hundreds: Robots.txt is Okay for Google to proceed with?
Hi all, We 2 sub domains with hundreds of pages where we need only 50 pages to get indexed which are important. Unfortunately the CMS of these sub domains is very old and not supporting "noindex" tag to be deployed on page level. So we are planning to block the entire sites from robots.txt and allow the 50 pages needed. But we are not sure if this is the right approach as Google been suggesting to depend mostly on "noindex" than robots.txt. Please suggest whether we can proceed with robots.txt file. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
AMP pages - should we be creating AMP versions of all site pages?
Hi all, Just wondering what people's opinions are on AMP pages - having seen the Google demo of how AMP pages will be given visibility on page one of Google for news-based content, do you think it is worth considering creating AMP versions of all pages, ready for when Google expands its inclusion of these super-fast pages?
Algorithm Updates | | A_Q1 -
We recently transitioned a site to our server, but Google is still showing the old server's urls. Is there a way to stop Google from showing urls?
We recently transitioned a site to our server, but Google is still showing the old server's urls. Is there a way to stop Google from showing urls?
Algorithm Updates | | Stamats0 -
Is there a we to get Google to index our site quicker?
I have updated some pages on a website, is there a way to get Google to index the page quicker?
Algorithm Updates | | webguru20140 -
What's the current situation for exact match ecommerce domains
I'm looking for some current opinions on exact-match domains when it comes to ecommerce sites. I currently own an "OK" brandable domain in a specific ecommerce niche. The opportunity has now come along to own the exact match domain for this category. For example catfood.com Is it more advisable to focus on brandables these days? I know Google doesn't give weight to exact match anymore but is there still a correlation not causation factor to consider? IE: the links back would be more targeted possibly?
Algorithm Updates | | NoClueSEO0 -
Bing Vs Google SERP
I realize the major search engines use different criteria but I don't see how - for the same home page keyword - my site could rank #3 on page 1 for a Bing search and be off the charts (Page 15+)? on Google. Has Google gone so far off the charts with their new Penguins and Pandas so as to be in a different universe? Seems Google is now extremely over-weighting big sites like Wikipedia, WebMD, eHow, etc. and in doing so vastly reducing the diversity of results shown. I am commonly seeing different pages of the same website appear multiple times in the first 2-3 pages of Google results. What's the point?
Algorithm Updates | | veezer0 -
Google and Wikipedia
Ok, I love Wikipedia as much as the next guy but the amount of weight that google puts on this site is getting crazy. My search terms that I am going after are "speakers" and "loudspeakers" Can somebody tell me why wikipedia needs the top 8 -10 spots for those terms? is that really a good search result for users of google? More of a rant then a question I know. I just needed to get that off my chest!.
Algorithm Updates | | kevin48030 -
How To Rank High In Google Places?
Hello SEOmoz, This question has been hounding me for a long time and I've never seen a single reliable information from the web that answers it. Anyway here's my question; Supposing that there are three Google places for three different websites having the same categories and almost same keywords and same district/city/IP how does Google rank one high from the other? Or simply put if you own one of those websites and you would want to rank higher over your competitors in Google places Search results how does one do it? A number of theories were brought up by some of my colleagues: 1. The age of the listing 2. The number of links pointing to the listing (supposing that one can build links to ones listing) 3. The name/url of the listing, tags, description, etc. 4. The address of the listing. 5. Authority of the domain (linked website) You see some listings have either no description, and only one category and yet they rank number one for a specific term/keyword whereas others have complete categories, descriptions etc. If you could please give me a definite answer I will surely appreciate it. Thank you very much and more power!
Algorithm Updates | | LeeAnn300