Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
-
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL.Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website?
I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.
-
besides my comment below the other issue I am facing is that I have several neighborhoods I would like to rank for within a region. Does this mean best idea is to get rid of these neighborhood pages (via noindex or other solution) and just focus on the region, until I am able to add unique content to the neighborhood pages?
-
rel=canonical may be difficult because each page has several pages, like:
example.com/region-name, example.com/region-name-2, example.com/region-name-3 etc
example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name, example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name-2 etcI do NOT have a "view all" page. Page 3 on the neighborhood page may include 30% of data found on page 3 of region page etc.
So what to be done?
-
So you exactly have an idea that you can work around with the MLS pages to make them more unique which in my opinion is the ideal choice so let’s move to the real question.
I don’t think no-follow is a bad option but if I would be at your places I would have used rel canonical instead of no follow.
Rel canonical simply tells search engine out of the two identical (or almost identical) page which one is the preferred version of the URL.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Best Practices for Creating Back Links from "Thought Leader" Content
What is the best way to use articles from a "thought leader" to build high-quality links to my website? I have heard that it is possible to pay bloggers to post business articles that link back to a website. That assuming these blogs have domain authority this is a good technique to improve ranking. Is this in fact true, and if so where would I find blogs to post our content. The purpose would be to promote real estate brokerage website. Any suggestions? Is this possible, advisable, best use of quality content? Alternatively, where else can we post engaging content to create links back to our site? Social media? The nature of the content would be such topics as how to find the best value in Manhattan office of loft space rentals, etcera. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Blog Content Displayed on Multiple Pages
We are developing an online guide that will provide information and listing for a few different cities in Canada and the US. We have blog content that will be pulled into each different city's blog articles page. Some articles are location agnostic and can be displayed for any city, and other articles will only be city specific, and only appear under a particular city. www.mysite.com//blog/seattle/article1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EBKMarketing
www.mysite.com/blog/portland/article1 From what I know of SEO, it seems that this is a perfect example for the use of canonicalization. So for article that will appear in multiple city guides, should there be a tag that points to a home for that article www.mysite.com/blog/article1 Thanks0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
My home page is not found by the "Grade a Page" tool
My home page as well as several important pages are not found by the Grade a Page tool. With our full https address I got this http://screencast.com/t/s1gESMlGwpa With just the www address I got this http://screencast.com/t/BMRHy36Ih https://www.joomlashack.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etabush
https://www.joomlashack.com/joomla-templates We recently lost a lot of positions for our most important keyword: Joomla Templates Please help us figure this out. Whats screwy with our site?0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey0 -
Maximum of 100 links on a page vs rel="nofollow"
All, I read within the SEOmoz blog that search engines consider 100 links on a page to be plenty, and we should try (where possible) to keep within the 100 limit. My question is; when a rel="nofollow" attribute is given to a link, does that link still count towards your maximum 100? Many thanks Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
Noindex term for pages
I have a client who has a virtuemart site and all of the "ask a question on this product" had been indexed on google. I have managed to get a noindex meta tag into the ask a question page, will these be dropped from the index next time they are crawled and google sees the noindex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webseoservices0