NOINDEX,FOLLOW on product pages
-
Hi
Can I have people's thoughts on something please. We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level. So imagine we have three ranges
Range 1 - A Bird
Range 2 - A Heart
Range 3 - A Flower
Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc. The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower). However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match). Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar. We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call.
So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich. The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages.
Any thoughts on this one?
Gary
-
Thanks for helping me bounce the ideas around. Always valuable comments from SeoMozzers! Have a good day!
-
Yes that's a very good idea. It is much stronger a signal in it's execution than the noindex/follow method given my concerns.
-
OK, thanks for your detailed response.
I am wondering whether I might just have a dynamically generated URL for the "product level" pages, i.e. page.php?id=1, page.php?id=2 etc and then have a canonical tag that is the same across them all. I could then limit the product pages to those that are genuinely different in some way. That way, I can avoid the noindex,follow issue, have very few duplicate product pages and avoid Panda related issues. Sound sensible?
Gary
-
The issue with a high volume of noindex,follow pages is understanding intent, and potentially having the message be confused. "We have x pages with noindex, follow - meaning "we don't think these pages are important enough to index, but the links on them are". Except if those links exist elsewhere, on enough indexed pages, what's the point being made?
Is it an attempt to artificially boost the signals for those pages that are linked by saying "look at all these extra links we have pointing to these other pages"? That's the concern especially since the implementation of over-optimization factors in algorithms. While it may not be Google's intent to devalue a site due to innocent behavior, their ability algorithmically to understand is limited.
Over the past year and a half I've seen more and more situations where Google's many layers of algorithmic decisions have resulted in client sites suffering because of a lack of human review that can determine "this was not an intentional attempt to over-optimize". I've seen it with internal linking, I've seen it when use of noindex/follow conflicts with canonical signals, and I've seen it where either of those conflicts with robots.txt instructions.
While no single case is guaranteed to be problematic (due to hundreds of factors being evaluated across multiple algorithms), at the same time, as a professional audit consultant I am not comfortable enough to then leave out the consideration where no single case is guaranteed to be safe either. Thus, my opinion of "best practices" is to "avoid potentially significant problems".
-
Alan Thanks for this. Can I check I understand your comments. Are u suggesting that a large number of noindex, follow pages causes google to lose interest in following the links from those pages? Do u know this to be the case through an empirical study? I like your suggestion of integrating the product purchase onto the category pages. I agree that would be ideal but the products themselves have alot of options and some are designed online so it could end up quite complex. Food for thought though as it would be a good solution SEO wise. I'm just a little concerned on a user ability front. Gary
-
One alternate method would be to integrate the products onto their individual "range" pages, with purchase capability and options right there. You'd need to ensure the overwhelming majority of those pages is still unique, however it would avoid potential confusion that comes from "noindex,follow" being used on a massive scale, which can itself be problematic. (Google needs to understand WHY there are so many nonidex pages, and what unique links exist on those pages that you want the crawler to follow them for).
-
Sounds like it makes sense and that you have thought it out. If the category pages are conversion friendly, sounds like it can be done. But if there is a way you can get the product pages to have unique content I would personally prefer the product pages to rank. By doing what you are suggesting you're putting the point of purchase a click further away, which isn't the end of the world.
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 page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Noindex meta tag
Hi When following Webmaster Tools/Optimization/HTML Improvements it says that we have duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions for hundreds of pages, As corrective action we have added to those pages and also changed title tags to make sure that they are different but still Webmaster keeps reporting that the duplication exist. Is it possible that google bot doesn't see our noindex code while crawling? By the way our seomoz report says that there is no duplicate title tag or meta description on our site google has crawled our site today and we received our report from seomoz today thanks
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
My website pages are not crawled, what to do?
Hi all. I have made some changes on the website so i like to crawled them by the search engines Google especially. I have made these changes around 2 weeks ago. I have submitted my website on good bookmarking websites. Also i used a tool available in Google webmasters "Fetch as Google", Resubmitted a sitemap.xml. Still my pages are not crawled your opinion please. Thanks
Technical SEO | | lucidsoftech0 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Different links to to the same page
Hi, Based on the user's actions we post activity into users Facebook timeline. And each activity has link back to our particular page on our website. For example if original page was: www.Domain.com from Facebook timeline it would be like this: www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 Do you think this will have a negative effect on our page rankings as we will eded up having a lot of different URL's to the same page? www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=456788765609 etc.. Thank you, Karen Bdoyan
Technical SEO | | showme0 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Removing Duplicate Pages
Hi everyone. I'm sure this falls under novice seo question. But how do i remove duplicate pages from my site. I have not created the pages per say. Their may be a an internal link on a page that links to the page causing the duplication. Do i remove the internal link here is a sample of a duplicate page http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fabout%2fticket-industry-news.aspx http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fhome.aspx&CntPageID=1 I know the url is way too long. working on it Thanks for your feedbacks.
Technical SEO | | ticketplatform0