How do I eliminate indexed products?
-
Please help! We got clobbered by Penguin and are at risk of having to close down after 10 years. We have been trying to figure out why and believe now it might be because of duplicate content. We added 2" inserts in March (over 500):
http://www.trophycentral.com/inserts1.html
Even though each is a different products, SEOMOZ is saying they are considered duplicate content. Given the timing, we think this might be the cause, even though it is totally legitimate.
Question - since these are now indexed and since we can't easily add content quickly, what is the best way to handle this situation? A no-index tag?
Is there a way to let Google know that their algorithm is detroying legitimate businesses??
-
Got it - thanks. I will be making the changes over the next few days. Unfortunately, I published the site last night and it will take about 18 hours so I can't access it for a while.
-
Remeber 6that should be a no-index,follow not a no-index,no-follow
-
Thanks, Alan. I had put a no-index, no-follow on the main category (inserts1.html) so that google could not get to the individual products to index them. That was the quickest thing I could do given how many products I need to update. Based on your note though, I will go through the individual products with a no-index, but it will take some time. Thanks again!
-
I can see them now - THANK YOU!!!
-
If they are noindex, then it should not be problem, but i would not no-follow as all links pointing the the no follow pages will waster their link juice, if you have no-index follow then the link jucie will flow back out of the no-indexed pages.
but having a look at the page, i can not see any no-index tag in the page
-
site:trophycentral.com -www shows all content indexed not within the www subdomain.
-
Sorry to bother you again - last question - I promise! Where did you see the mobile.trophycentral.com pages indexed? I when on to google and didn't see them in the main index. Thanks!
-
Alan, thank you! I just sent a note to the programmer who created the mobile site. For now, I am going to have them get it out of the index and I have stopped the redirection so that there is no mobile site. This may not be the best thing for the long-run, but for now I can at least be sure I fix the mobile issue. I have also fixed the strictlygifts linking. Working on removing more duplicate content now.
Thanks again!
-
This is a sad reality that many business owners face. SEO is a very complex process and unfortunately it's a case of two-fold barriers to success.
On the one hand, not all SEO's really know, or even if they do, don't consider long-term ramifications of what they might be recommending. Many of us in the industry think and act otherwise, however it is a problem nonetheless.
On the other hand, Google constantly changes their rules to a certain extent - as more people look for ways to game the system, what may have been acceptable previously can become unacceptable as Google tries to clean up the mess. It's a vicious circle.
So...
You can get "rid" of indexed pages by blocking them through a robots.txt file - if there are patterns to their URLs. if it's an entire site, you can block the whole site in one line in the robots.txt file. If it's multiple sections of a site, you can block entire sections while leaving other sections open for search indexing. A professional should be tapped to help you with that.
Its important to consider whether pages should be blocked, or instead, redirected to other pages that you want indexed or are indexed that are similar in nature.
Bad link evaluation is a professional process and should not be undertaken lightly. In many cases, site owners will ignore your requests, so it's important to at least get the request process right and to document the process. Again, a professional is needed for that.
And yes, you can submit a request after that's done.
Unfortunately, anyone you task to do the work that would be able to help you will both charge you for their time and cannot guarantee that what is done will be enough. It's another reality of the world we operate in because Google cannot reveal trade secrets to help you know what exactly needs to be done.
-
Alan, thank you so much for this. I am the founder of the business and not a webmaster, so parden these questions:
1. I originally thought it was the mobile site that caused this given the timing, but was told that somehow google was on the lookout for mobile.xxx and that it was not an issue.** I am sure you are right! How can I get rid of the indexed pages? ** I turned the mobile redirect off a couple of weeks ago so it is not even active.
2. My search provider told me they made changes to get rid of most of the pages, but since I are still seeing them, I am concerned. Is thiere something I can do to get rid of the pages?
3. I can easily change strictlygifts - this is the only thing that was intentional (but done about 8 years ago!).
4. How can I tell which are bad links - low page rank?
I have made thousands of changes based on the advice of others - improved the site speed, removed crawl errors, got rid of hundreds of pages, added duplicate content, etc. We were not given any sort of manual penalty - can I still submit a request after the above is done?
Thank you again. I have built this business over the last 10 years and to see it destroyed overnight is heartbreaking. I can't tell you how much your help is appreciated.
-
I checked a few things -you have bigger fish to fry.
Search.trophycentral.com and mobile.trophycentral.com - are either of those causing duplicate content problems on a mass scale? Google has 8k www pages indexed, and three times as many non www pages indexed.
Then looking at your inbound link profile, you've got a huge volume of inbound links from very low quality "SEO only" sites relative to your total inbound link profile. Very serious problem there.
Then you've got another site you apparently own site (StrictlyGifts.com) where you have a footer link with keywords, from every page of that site pointing to the TrophyCentral site.
The list goes on.
The cumulative impact is clearly a case of your site showing all the signs of SEO stuffing and unnatural link building. Even if some of it was unintentional (like the duplicate content conflicts across sub-domains), the pattern is clear.
1. Do all you can to get as many of the bad links removed as possible. Keep a spreadsheet of that effort.
2. Block search.trophycentral.com from search engines.
3. Either redirect mobile.trophycentral.com to the main www site and have the main www site redesigned to be flexible and responsive to different viewing platforms, or get together with a mobile SEO expert to otherwise address that duplicate content issue.
4. Add high quality unique descriptive text based content to all of your primary category and sub-category pages, and even some on every product page.
5. Consider submitting a reconsideration request to Google after you've made real headway on all of that work. Be willing to submit the spreadsheet to show links you've had removed and which you tried to but couldn't. Explain all the other steps you've taken.
You may get a bounce after that or it could just take the next Penguin update if you've done most of that before the next update.
Either way, that's just recommendations that come from only a few minutes looking at your site. There could be many other issues to address.
-
Alan, thanks. Not to sound stupid, but
1. What about the product looks like it is spam to you?
2. If I have a no index, no follow in inserts1, will that prevent goolge from all of the sub pages?
3. If the pages are already indexed, how can I get rid of them?
Sorry for the ignorant questions, but I own the business and I am not a webmaster.
Thnaks!
-
I had a quick look at this page http://www.trophycentral.com/50401.html
I found below, it is much longer thenthe sample i gave here, i would get rid of it, it looks like you are trying to spam the results
var = new Array('Have used them many times. Seamless transactions - all done through the web. Top quality product. Fast delivery. Custom engraving, including logos. Highly recommended. DR Angola, IN','This was my first order with Trophy Central, and my experience was great. I did everything on-line, the....
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
-
Truncated product names
Due to the restraints of category page layout many of the products in certain categories have the product titles truncated, in some cases missing off 2-5 words depending on the product in question. The product name which displays on the category page is lifted straight from the product page itself, so not possible to do something like "product name including spec..." to place ... to indicate a bit more. I'm assuming not but just wanted to check that Google will not frown on this. Text is not being hidden it just does not render fully in the restricted space. So there is a scenario of 'bits of' text in the source not displaying on the rendered page.
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
How to know how much pages are indexed on Google?
I have a big site, there are a way to know what page are not indexed? I know that you can use site: but with a big site is a mess to check page by page. This is a tool or a system to check a entire site and automatically find non-indexed pages?
Technical SEO | | markovald0 -
Search results indexed
Hi there, is is bad practice in seo to have search results for products indexed? For example a search result of holidays to Ibiza, with lots of deals coming up? its a search query url that would be indexed, with just an image and price per product on the page, with about 10 per page? Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Carwling and indexing problems
hi, i have noticed since my site was upgraded that google is taking a long time to publish my articles. before the upgrade google would publish the article straight away, but now it takes an average of around 4 days. the article i am talking about at the moment is here http://www.in2town.co.uk/celebrities-in-the-news/stuart-hall-has-his-prison-sentence-for-sex-crimes-doubled-to-30-months now i have a blog here on blogger and the article was picked up within six mins http://showbizgossipandnews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/stuart-hall-has-his-prison-sentence-for.html so i am just wondering what the problem is and what i need to solve this my problem is, my site is mostly a news site so it is no good to me if google is publishing new stories every four days, any help would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
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
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
Index inactive mobile site?
Hi, I have a question wrt Mobile version of a site. Previously, we had a mobile site which is no longer active and there are possibilities of resurrecting it in future, so we have a 302 redirect which points to the homepage (desktop version). Currently, the mobile site is indexed by the search engines. To avoid the duplicate content issue, is it recommended to use robots.txt and block the spiders from mobile content or apply 301 redirect until the mobile site is up and running, OR continue with the 302 redirect. Any suggestions will be helpful. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | RaksG0 -
Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them. I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0