Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
-
Hello Community,
Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed.
We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000.
Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000.
When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report.
So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well.
Thanks for your feedback.
Chris
-
Unless a page can give value to a searcher (not just an existing customer) it shouldn't be in Google's search index.
Sometimes I like to go back to the basics. Remember that search engines exist to help people find information that they WANT to find. Realistically, people are not going to want to find every page on your websites in SERPS.I suggest you ask yourself this question; does this page offer information that someone would actually want to search for, and make your decision accordingly.
p.s. Having said all of that, I'll answer your question. The answer is yes, having thin pages on your site can hurt your domain. If your pages offer value to searchers, I suggest you improve them instead of remove them, but if they don't offer value to searchers don't waste your time, and just no-index them.
-
So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site?
Yes.
We had a site with some image content pages that had not a lot of text. They ranked great for years. Then, BAM, rankings across the site dropped on a Panda update.
We added noindex/follow to these pages, redirected some that were obsolete and our rankings came back with the next update.
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
-
How seasonal would you expect organic on a b2b site to be?
I have a client who has a b2b site catering to a white collar information market. Looking back in G/A, it appears that they've never had a good organic search Summer, but have made plenty of YOY gains.This Summer is a little better than past Summers. Personally, I have read about people who take Summer vacations. Mostly in France. This is a U.S. site and U.S. traffic catering to business executives. I can see it in the parking lot of the downtown office building I work in... fewer cars after Memorial Day and more cars after Labor Day. How seasonal would you expect that kind of organic search traffic to be, say from April vs July? Would prefer answers from direct B2B experience, rather than guesses. But, if a guess is all you have, I will gladly accept that! Thanks... Darcy
Algorithm Updates | | 945010 -
Page 2 to page 1
I've found a lot of times it does not take much activity to get a keyword from ranking on page 3 of Google or further down to page 2 but there seems to be a hurdle from page 2 to page 1. It is very frustrating to be between 11 and 15 but not being able to make that push to 9 or 10. Has anyone got or seen any data to justifiy this?
Algorithm Updates | | S_Curtis0 -
Staging site - Treated as duplicate?
Last week (exactly 8 days ago to be precise) my developer created a staging/test site to test some new features. The staging site duplicated the entire existing site on the same server. To explain this better -My site address is - www.mysite.com The path of the new staging site was www.mysite/staging I realized this only today and have immediately restricted robot text and put a no index no follow on the entire duplicate server folder but I am sure that Google would have indexed the duplicate content by now? So far I do not see any significant drop in traffic but should I be worried? and what if anything can I do at this stage?
Algorithm Updates | | rajatsharma0 -
Quickest way to deindex a large number of pages
Our site was recently hacked by spammers posting fake content and bringing down our servers, etc. After a few months, we finally figured out what was going on and fixed the issue. However, it turns out that Google has indexed 26K+ spammy pages and we've lost page rank and search engine rankings as a result. What is the best and fastest way to get these pages out of Google's index?
Algorithm Updates | | powpowteam0 -
SEO ANALYSIS ON A NEW SITE
Hi just would like if anyone could help me in provide some seo analysis on a new website http://www.ppilegalservices.co.uk/ main keyword is mis-sold ppi Its a very competitive keyword but not being able to come on google result in long tail keywords as well, Just got ranked on brand keywords like PPI LEGAL Services. Also running out of ideas as to how to create quality content any tips please? many thanks
Algorithm Updates | | conversiontactics0 -
How to build good content and choose right keywords.?
I have started building content for our website using the Wordpress tool. Now I wanted to know that I use GA and the Adwords keyword tool. I go in for exact matching keywords and have selected a few of them. How do I know if these keywords are actually the ones going to give me good traffic? How can I select good keywords and write content along them. I don't wish to over stuff articles with the keywords. How can I refrain from doing so. Any optimum limit through which I know how much of the keyword needs to occur how many times within an article? Please give some good insights as to how this is accomplished? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | shanky11 -
Accidently blocked our site for an evening?
Yesterday at about 5pm I switched our site to a new server and accidentally blocked our site from google for the evening. our domain is posnation.com and we are ranked in the top 3 in almost all pos related keywords. When i got in this morning i realized the mistake and went to google web tools and noticed the site was blocked so i went to fetch as google bot and corrected that. Now the message says: Check to see that your robots.txt is working as expected. (Any changes you make to the robots.txt content below will not be saved.)
Algorithm Updates | | POSNation
robots.txt file Downloaded Status
http://www.posnation.com/robots.txt 1 hours ago 200 (Success) When you go to google and type "pos systems" we are still #2 so i assume all is still ok. My question is will this potentially hurt our rankings and should i be worried and is there anything else I can do.0 -
Changes in Sitemap Indexation in GWT?
I've noticed some significant changes in the number and percentage of indexed URLs for the sitemaps we've been submitting to Google. I've been tracking these numbers directly from Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Sitemaps. We've made some changes that could be causing the changes we're seeing, but I want to confirm that this wasn't just a change in the way Google reports the indexation. Has anyone else noticed major changes, greater than a 30% change, in the indexation of your sitemaps in the past week? Thanks, Joe
Algorithm Updates | | JoeAmadon0