Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
-
Hey folks,
How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls.
These pages are super low competition.
The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal)
a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned.
b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them?
c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned?
d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google.
Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info.
-
it's not a strategy, it's due to technical limitations on the dev side. i agree though thanks.
So, I asked this question to a very advanced SEO guru and he said they could be seen as doorways and present some risk and advised against it. That combined with the probability that they will most likely get dropped from Google's index anyway and we know that Google says they want pages to be part of the sites architecture has me leaning towards nofollowing all of them and maybe experiment with allowing 1000 to get indexed and see what happens with them.
Thanks for your input folks
-
I'd go back to the drawing board and rework your strategy.
Do you need additional sites? 150K orphaned pages you want indexed sounds spammy or poor site architecture to me.
-
Yikes, I didn't know the site was that big. Still, if you're afraid of how Google would "react" to those orphaned pages, I'd still test small, regardless of how large your overall site is.
-
Yea 1000 is probably a big enough sample.
10,000 seems like a lot i guess but not when you've got a site with 4.5 million pages.
-
yea submitting sitemap.xml files for 300k pages that are not part of the site seems a bit obnoxious.
-
we definitely want the 150k in the index since they are legitimate pages and linked to on the site. it's the 300k of orphaned ones we have to take along as a package deal that i am worried about. too many orphaned pages for Google.
-
That's a good idea. 10,000 Is still a lot. You could even test fewer than 10,000 pages. Why not try 1,000?
-
Hmmm. I am leaning towards the following solution since I would rather be on the cautious side, maybe this makes sense?
a) we noindex these 300k orphaned pages and do not submit sitemap.xml files
b) we experiment with say 10,000 pages and we allow only those to get indexed and submit sitemap.xml files for them
c) we closely monitor their indexing and ranking performance so we can determine if these are even worth opening up to Google and taking any risk.
-
In my opinion, add the 150k pages in the site map along with the 300k pages, let Google index all the pages and once they are all indexed , you can take a call on de indexing the 150k pages based on their traction.
-
I have no hard evidence, but if it were my site, I would do option C but keep an eye on what happens, and if I noticed anything strange happening, I would implement option B. But if option C makes you nervous, I see no reason you couldn't or shouldn't noindex them right off the bat.
That's merely one person's opinion, however.
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
-
Weird Indexing Issues with the Pages and Rankings
When I found the my page was non-existent on the search results page, I requested Google to index my page via the Search Console. And then just a few minutes after I did that, that page rose to top 3 ranking on the search page (with the same keyword and browser search). It happens to most of the pages on my website. Maybe a week later the rankings sank again, and I had to do the process again to make my pages to the top. Any reasons to explain this phenomenon, and how I can fix this issue? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrmrsteven0 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
How long to re-index a page after being blocked
Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Howcome Google is indexing one day 2500 pages and the other day only 150 then 2000 again ect?
This is about an big affiliate website of an customer of us, running with datafeeds... Bad things about datafeeds: Duplicate Content (product descriptions) Verrryyyy Much (thin) product pages (sometimes better to noindex, i know, but this customer doesn't want to do that)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Why google index some meta titles I dont have?
Hi there, I have a problem with a website and I am desperate to find a solution because I have tried many things and nothing works! My website its: adtriboo.com Google does not find my main URL (main countro spain) www.adtriboo.com/es and I dont see this page its indexed in google. See link https://www.google.es/search?num=100&hl=es&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Aadtriboo.com&oq=site%3Aadtriboo.com&gs_l=hp.3...1189.4419.0.4586.17.17.0.0.0.0.223.1457.9j6j1.16.0...0.0...1c.1.8.hp.brTKX-zPwVI Also, google its showing some meta titles that are not in my page! For example my subfolder for the country Chile shows this title: Chile - Adtriboo but this its my real title Diseño logo, logotipos, video corporativo - adtriboo In webmaster tools everything looks good, and if I explore the webpage like google in webmaster tools the code its ok and everything lookd okay. If you see for example the URL from Chile (www.adtriboo.com/es_CL) the meta title is not the right one! Also i have a problem indexatión because i am not visible for any of my keywords even in the page 10! Please, somebody knows what happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Comunicare0 -
What Sources to use to compile an as comprehensive list of pages indexed in Google?
As part of a Panda recovery initiative we are trying to get an as comprehensive list of currently URLs indexed by Google as possible. Using the site:domain.com operator Google displays that approximately 21k pages are indexed. Scraping the results however ends after the listing of 240 links. Are there any other sources we could be using to make the list more comprehensive? To be clear, we are not looking for external crawlers like the SEOmoz crawl tool but sources that would be confidently allow us to determine a list of URLs currently hold in the Google index. Thank you /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sp800 -
Landing page indexed and ranking in less then 24 hours
Hi, I got a landing page which went up last night about 11pm. Its been indexed and ranked since then. Its a EMD and has about 600 words of unqiue content. It currently sits on page 9 for what I would say is a non competitive term (the top result is not an EMD and has 10 backlinks from the same site, which has no PR). Now my question is this: Would you say that page 9 is the given position Google thinks this website should sit at? Or because its so new could I very much expect some more movement? Basically up the rankings? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0