Third party pages
-
Suppose you are using a third party tool such as an affiliate program. Typically, all the files are organized under one subdirectory. In addition, you may have little or no ability to modify any of the files in terms of SEO. Would you recommend hiding the entire subdirectory with a noindex?
Best,
Christopher -
I am unclear on what you are asking. The only thing I can share based on your question is to noindex any content you don't wish Google to index or otherwise have concerns about.
-
If I noindex all links from my pages to the main page of the affiliate program, and Google can still see all the other pages within the affiliate subdirectory, is that OK? In other words, if I put a noindex firewall between my pages and the third party pages, is it OK that the third party pages exist in a subdirectory on my site?
Best,
Christopher -
I would recommend using the noindex meta tag over blocking pages with the robots.txt file. Either will achieve the same result, but the noindex tag is a superior solution for several reasons:
-
the noindex tag will allow a crawler to see the rest of the page and for your PR to continue it's natural flow throughout your site.
-
there are times when a robots.txt file is deleted or modified in error, and then you have a big headache on your hands. Even if a meta tag is erased, it would just affect a single page so the damage is a lot more manageable.
-
-
I should have been more clear. The affiliate code that we licensed tracks the referrals from our affiliates and pays commissions for conversions to sales. We installed the package in a subdirectory. While the package does allow some customization, the code is not written to be modified. A number of pages have the same titles.
Per your suggestion, I added a Disallow in the robots.txt to keep the bots away from that subdirectory.
Best,
Christopher -
You should have the ability to completely control any and all content which appears on your site. An affiliate program may provide images, suggested text, and may have certain requirements such as always including certain phrases, etc. That is fine, but not entire content blocks.
If you are sharing any content, affiliate or otherwise, which is not under your control or is duplicated on other sites, then yes, I would recommend the noindex tag being applied to the content.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Unique Pages with Thin Content vs. One Page with Lots of Content
Is there anyone who can give me a definitive answer on which of the following situations is preferable from an SEO standpoint for the services section of a website? 1. Many unique and targeted service pages with the primary keyword in the URL, Title tag and H1 - but with the tradeoff of having thin content on the page (i.e. 100 words of content or less). 2. One large service page listing all services in the content. Primary keyword for URL, title tag and H1 would be something like "(company name) services" and each service would be in the H2 title. In this case, there is lots of content on the page. Yes, the ideal situation would be to beef up content for each unique pages, but we have found that this isn't always an option based on the amount of time a client has dedicated to a project.
On-Page Optimization | | RCDesign741 -
Any issue with my On page SEO
Kindly review my website and let me know if there is any issue with On page or I am missing anything? Home page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com Deep Page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com/natural/divya-triphala-churna/
On-Page Optimization | | MasonBaker0 -
Page Analysis - Helping Product Pages Outrank Search Results Pages
Hi! We have a lot of our search results pages that have been indexed and outrank our product pages and in some instance the actual product pages barely show up at all. Here is an example query that includes our brand name: http://goo.gl/cgB6W So, we have loads of actual product pages, video pages, etc that should be showing up here, but are not and this is just one example. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of these Search Results pages out there and utlimately we would love to de-index them altogether, but it's going to have to be carefully done. So, was wondering if anyone would want to check out one of our product pages and give any feedback as to what we could change to possibly improve rank or to make them more search friendly or hopefully to help them rise above these indexed search results pages? Here is an example product page: http://goo.gl/2R4IT Thanks!! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Pages or Blog posts?
Hi, I am currently building content for a customer's website. There are approximately 50 new content pages I am building about the business, products they serve, how-tos and tips and advice. The website is built on Wordpress so my question is would it be best to post this content as a different blog posts or as separate pages in Wordpress and link them up to a 'hub page' as mentioned on this post about How to rank (point 16) Thanks for any advice.
On-Page Optimization | | btiffin0 -
10 Mobile Pages. 5 Desktop Pages. Canonnical to where?
I have a mobile site with more pages than the desktop site. Normally I would just point the page equivalents to the desktop site using the rel canonnical tag. What about the 5 pages? Do I just leave them be? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Imajery0 -
301 redirects from several sub-pages to one sub-page
Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...
On-Page Optimization | | MarieA1 -
Spammy keywords on a page
My client's website has a box of text on each page that is spammy and horrible to read and stuffed with keywords. The text boxes are there only for search engines as they mean nothing to humans. I say remove them as it must be doing more harm than good. However, my client is scared to remove them as the text has been there on each page for ten years and he is worried about a drop in visitor numbers if they are removed. Is he right to be worried?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0 -
Page Cache And Index
If you are browsing a site, what is the best way or programs to use to see if the page has been indexed and cached? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | gregster10000