Noindex junk pages with inbound links?
-
I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.
A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that...
and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text... nice number of footprints.)
Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page's keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don't want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda's filter. They've got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original...).
So I'm thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.
Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I'm considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I'm open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.
What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?
p.s. I'm asking this on my blog (seoroi.com/blog/ ) too, so if you're up for me to quote you (and link to your site, do say so. You aren't guaranteed to be quoted if you answer here, but it's one of the easier ways you'll get a good quality link.
p.p.s. Related note: I'm looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for my blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you're interested. You can also PM me here on SEOmoz, though I don't login as frequently.
-
These links likely aren't bringing much if any traffic, so it's a moot point here, imho.
-
Sorry if I was unclear. My thinking was that a high bounce rate probably indicates that many visitors don't find the content relevant. If the inbound links you mentioned are bringing lots of traffic to your pages but people are just bouncing right off the site, the value of those links is greatly diminished. If this is the case, I don't think the pages are worth keeping. If people are actually staying on the site after landing on the page, then I would focus on improving those pages and not worry as much about how they find the pages.
-
I don't see the connection to bounce rate? You mean click traffic or search traffic.
-
I would also be interested to know what people think about this. We have an issue where a few years ago, an SEO firm produced a few dozen "articles" for our site which consisted entirely of keyword-stuffed junk with lots of hidden internal links to other relevant parts of the site. Each page has thousands of links to it from link farms and junk directories.
I suspect that there are actually many legitimate, reputable websites out there who suffer from this problem. Any website with many thousands of pages might very easily conceal the remnants of old, poorly-executed SEO efforts for years, particularly if the people making the SEO decisions are unaware of the difference between black hat/white hat practices. With the release of the farmer update, this could be a big problem.
For our situation, we wrestled with whether we should noindex the pages, remove them and implement a 301 redirect to something more relevant, or just leave them as they are. For now we have left the junk pages alone; only a couple of the pages rank within the first 50 results for their targeted keyword, and the pages receive very little traffic. However, if the pages you are talking about get a lot of traffic with a very high bounce rate, I would probably try something else.
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
-
Link equity when merging product pages
Hi, our e-commerce website has just over 900 products. A vast majority are very unique and not similar to one another. However, early in our development, we listed similar variations separately. For example, we had a separate product listing for different color options: Black, Tan, and Green. They do not rank too great by themselves. However, the product is very popular and the search volume is near 9k a month. Our competitors have one listing with several color options, which is what we are proposing. We would enable 301 redirects from the Tan and Green options, which would redirect to the new variation listing. Is this wise? We want to capitalize on this opportunity, and apply this practice for other product listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewColvin0 -
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
How to handle broken links to phantom pages appearing in webmaster tools
Hi,Would love to hear different experiences and thoughts on this one. We have a site that is plagued with 404's in the Webmaster Tools. A significant number of them have never existed, for instance affiliates have linked to them with the wrong URL or scraper sites have linked to them with a truncated version of the URL and an ellipsis eg; /my-nonexistent... What's the best way to handle these? If we do nothing and mark as fixed, they reappear in the broken links report. If we 301 redirect and mark as fixed they reappear. We tried 410 (gone forever) and marking as fixed; they re-appeared. We have a lot of legacy broken links and we would really like to clean up our WMT broken link profile - does anyone know of a way we can make these links to non extistent pages disappear once and for all? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
Strange 404s in GWT - "Linked From" pages that never existed
I’m having an issue with Google Webmaster Tools saying there are 404 errors on my site. When I look into my “Not Found” errors I see URLs like this one: Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ When I click on that and go to the “Linked From” tab, GWT says the page is being linked from http://www.myrtlebeach.com/Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ The problem here is that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, making it impossible for anything to be “linked from” that page. Many more strange URLs like this one are also showing as 404 errors. All of these contain “subcatsubc” somewhere in the URL. My Question: If that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, how is it possible to be linking to itself and causing a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fuel0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Home Page Link Juice Dilution
I have worked to build out a keyword targeted library of over 700 Guides of approx. 800 word each. They are specifically targeted at actionable verticals and contain 3x strategically placed CTAs in each article. So far, I have only managed to get a low level of uniques per day to this section of the website. This website's external backlinks are largely pointed at the home page. Furthermore, the home page has a footer link to 10,000 SEO crawl-able user generated profiles. These profiles have little potential for conversion and offer little value. Given the above information, I was hoping that someone could help me with the following questions: Is it possible that home page link juice is becoming diluted as result 10,000 user profiles being live on the site? If so, can a "no follow" on the home page footer link to the user profiles prevent the juice from transferring? Overall, I would like to redirect this PR5 domain's link juice to these guides where they will have a much higher conversion rate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
Does google detect all updated page with new links
as paid links? Example: A PR 4 page updates the page a year later with new links. Does Google discredit these links as being fishy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900