Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

No index directory pages?

Technical SEO

965

Locked

JSOC Subscriber last edited by

All,

I have a site built on WordPress with directory software (edirectory) on the backend that houses a directory of members. The Wordpress portion of the site is full of content and drives traffic through to the directory. Like most directories, the results pages are thin on content and mainly contain links to member profiles.

Is it best to simply no index the search results for the directory portion of the site?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
EricaMcGillivray @JSOC last edited by

Thin content is something penalized by Google's Panda, and to avoid it, definitely use James' suggestions depending on what you want from your site.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
JSOC Subscriber @JamesNorquay last edited by

Thanks James. So, if it were you, you would not simply let the pages be crawled without utilizing one of the tactics mentioned above?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
JamesNorquay last edited by

You could utilise the canonical tags on these pages and point them to rich content related pages, or if you do not want to you could just no index the files in robots.txt.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Over 500 thin URLs indexed from dynamically created pages (for lightboxes)

I have a client who has a resources section. This section is primarily devoted to definitions of terms in the industry. These definitions appear in colored boxes that, when you click on them, turn into a lightbox with their own unique URL. Example URL: /resources/?resource=dlna The information for these lightboxes is pulled from a standard page: /resources/dlna. Both are indexed, resulting in over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content. My question is this: Should they be de-indexed? Another option I'm knocking around is working with the client to create Skyscraper pages, but this is obviously a massive undertaking given how many they have. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces

0
Google indexes page elements

Hello We face this problem that Google indexes page elements from WordPress as single pages. How can we prevent these elements from being indexed separately and being displayed in the search results? For example this project: www.rovana.be When scrolling down the search results, there are a lot of elements that are indexed separately. When clicking on the link, this is wat we see (see attachements) Does anyone have experience with this way of indexing and how can we solve this problem? Thanks! LlAWG4w.png C7XDDYS.png gVroomx.png
Technical SEO | | conversal

0
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?

My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore

0
Page Content

Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.
Technical SEO | | iskq

0
Duplicates on the page

Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors

0
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?

Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
TalkInThePark
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark

0
Dynamic page

I have few pages on my site that are with this nature /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this "According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " ) _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems" I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy

0
No. of links on a page

Is it true that If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_2005

0