Could large number of "not selected" pages cause a penalty?
-
My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update).
I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken".
The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty.
I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed.
Could this have been what caused the error?
(If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate)
Thanks!
-
Canonical tag to what? Themselves? Or the page they should be? Are these pages unique by some URL variables only? If so, you can instruct Google to ignore specific get variables to resolve this issue but you would also want to fix your sitemap woes: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
This is where it gets sticky, these pages are certainly not helping and not being indexed, Google Webmaster tools shows us that, but if you have this problem, how many other technical problems could the site have?
We can be almost certain you have some kind of panda filter but to diagnose it further we would need a link and access to analytics to determine what has gone wrong and provide more detailed guidance to resolve the issues.
This could be a red herring and your problem could be elsewhere but with no examples we can only give very general responses. If this was my site I would certainly look to identify the most likely issues and work through this in a pragmatic way to eliminate possible issues and look at other potentials.
My advice would be to have the site analysed by someone with distinct experience with Panda penalties who can give you specific feedback on the problems and provide guidance to resolve them.
If the URL is sensitive and can't be shared here, I can offer this service and am in the UK. I am sure can several other users at SEOMoz can also help. I know Marie Haynes offers this service as I am sure Ryan Kent could help also.
Shout if you have any questions or can provide more details (or a url).
-
Hi,
Thanks for the detailed answer.
We have many duplicate pages, but they all have canonical tags on them... shouldn't that be solving the problem. Would pages with the canonical tag be showing up here?
-
Yes, this can definitely cause problems. In fact this is a common footprint in sites hit by the panda updates.
It sound like you have some sort of canonical issue on the site: Multiple copies of each page are being crawled. Google is finding lots of copies of the same thing, crawling them but deciding that they are not sufficiently unique/useful to keep in the index. I've been working on a number of sites hit with the same issue and clean up can be a real pain.
The best starting point for reading is probably this article here on SEOmoz : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content . That article includes some useful links on how to diagnose and solve the issues as well, so be sure to check out all the linked resources.
-
Hey Sarah
There are always a lot of moving parts when it comes to penalties but the very fact that you lost traffic on a known panda date really points towards this being a Panda style of penalty. Panda, is an algorithmic penalty so you will not receive any kind of notification in Webmaster Tools and likewise, a re-inclusion request will not help, you have to fix the problem to resolve the issues.
The not selected pages are likely a big part of your problem. Google classes not selected pages as follows:
"Not selected: Pages that are not indexed because they are substantially similar to other pages, or that have been redirected to another URL. More information."
If you have the best part of 3 million of these pages that are 'substantially similar' to other pages then there is every change that this is a very big part of your problem.
Obviously, there are a lot of moving parts to this. This sounds highly likely this is part of your problem and just think how this looks to Google. 2.6 million pages that are duplicated. It is a low quality signal, a possible attempt at manipulation or god knows what else but what we do know, is that is unlikely to be a strong result for any search users so those pages have been dropped.
What to do?
Well, firstly, fix your site map and sort out these duplication problems. It's hard to give specifics without a link to the site in question but just sort this out. Apply the noindex tag dynamically if needs be, remove these duplicates from the sitemap, heck, remove the sitemap alltogether for a while if needs be till it is fixed. Just sort out these issues one way or another.
Happy to give more help here if I can but would need a link or some such to advise better.
Resources
You asked for some links but I am not completely sure what to provide here without a link but let me have a shot and provide some general points:
1. Good General Panda Overview from Dr. Pete
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
2. An overview of canonicalisation form Google
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066
3. A way to diagnose and hopefully recover from Panda from John Doherty at distilled.
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/beating-the-panda-diagnosing-and-rescuing-a-clients-traffic/
4. Index Status Overview from Google
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366
Summary
You have a serious problem here but hopefully one that can be resolved. Panda is a primarily focused at on page issues and this is an absolute doozy of an on page issue so sort it out and you should see a recovery. Keep in mind you have 75 times more problem pages than actual content pages at the moment in your site map so this may be the biggest case I have ever seen so I would be very keen to see how you get on and what happens when you resolve these issues as I am sure would the wider SEOMoz community.
Hope this helps & please fire over any questions.
Marcus
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
-
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
The "webmaster" disallowed all ROBOTS to fight spam! Help!!
One of the companies I do work for has a magento site. I am simply the SEO guy and they work the website through some developers who hold access to their systems VERY tightly. Using Google Webmaster Tools I saw that the robots.txt file was blocking ALL robots. I immediately e-mailed out and received a long reply about foreign robots and scrappers slowing down the website. They told me I would have to provide a list of only the good robots to allow in robots.txt. Please correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't Robots.txt optional?? Won't a bad scrapper or bot still bog down the site? Shouldn't that be handled in httaccess or something different? I'm not new to SEO but I'm sure some of you who have been around longer have run into something like this and could provide some suggestions or resources I could use to plead my case! If I'm wrong.. please help me understand how we can meet both needs of allowing bots to visit the site but prevent the 'bad' ones. Their claim is the site is bombarded by tons and tons of bots that have slowed down performance. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoshuaLindley0 -
Subcategories within "New Arrivals" section - duplicate content?
Hi there, My client runs an e-commerce store selling shoes that features a section called "New Arrivals" with subcategories, such as "shoes," "wedges," "boots," "sandals," etc. There are already main subcategories on the site that target these terms. These are specifically pages for "New Arrivals - Boots," etc. The shoes listed on each new arrivals subcategory page are also listed in the main subcategory page. Given that there is not really any search volume for "Brand + new arrivals in boots," but lots of search volume for "Brand + boots," what is the proper way to handle these new arrivals subcategory pages? Should each subcategory have a rel=canonical tag pointing to the main subcategory? Should they be de-indexed? Should I keep them all indexed but try to make the content as unique as possible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Can pop-ups cause duplicate content issues in product pages?
Normally for ecommerce clients that have 100's of products we advise for size guides, installation guides etc to be placed as downloadable PDF resources to avoid huge blocks of content on multiple product pages. If content was placed in a popup e.g. fancybox, across multiple product pages would this be read by Google as duplicate content? Examples for this could be: An affiliate site with mutiple prices for a product and pop-up store reviews A clothing site with care and size guides What would be the best practice or setup?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Should I NOFOLLOW my "Add To Cart" buttons?
Hello and Merry Christmass Should I NOFOLLOW my "Add To Cart" buttons? My e-commerce site has hundreds of products. Content wise, there is no real value to the reader on that page (besides for some testimonials and "why here" sentences). So it is not a page you'd want / expect to find in the SERPs. Also, with hundreds of links pointing to this page it would be "stronger" than other important pages which doesn't make sense. Last but not least, if I have limited time that the bots are on my site, why keep sending them to a non important page. This is why I am leaning to nofollowing the "add to cart" buttons and looking for reinforcements. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Is this the "Google Dance"?
We just did a site redesign, and removed the noindex, etc. about 10 days ago. Over the last 24 hours, I've gotten some of my top keywords on the first page, but now they are gone, a few hours later. I assume this is typical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0