Should I be deindexing pages with thin or weak content?

[Jonathan_Hatton]

If I have pages that rank product categories by alphabetical order should I deindex those pages? Keeping in mind the pages do not have any content apart from product titles?

For example:

www.url.com/albums/a/

www.url.com/albums/b/

If I deindexed these pages would I lose any authority passed through internal linking?

[Jonathan_Hatton]

Cheers Guys,Thanks for clearing that up!

[Modi]

Hi - If you have too many thin pages developed on site - the best way as suggested by Chris too - is 'noindex, follow'

There is no negative Impact, rather helps Search Engines to understand site hierarchy better - by been allowed to crawl and index on rather pages with full of content. The follow tag will pass on all link authority to internal links. Only the page will be deindexed from search engines

Its in a way good - as no user will land on to pages, with very little or no content - thus avoiding single page bounces too

[Chris.Menke]

Reducing the size by eliminating those pages won't have any negative effect on your site.

[Jonathan_Hatton]

Hi Chris,Thats great!

So If I keep them followed, the link juice will still pass on. Do you think it will have a negative impact on the site as a whole, by decreasing the amount of pages being indexed by Google. i.e. Reducing the site size?

Thanks for the articles aswell, very useful!

[Chris.Menke]

Jonathan,

If you noindex, follow them, link juice will pass from upstream links through to the downstream links but if you nofollow them, it won't.

This thread goes into some detail on the same topic http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-treat-internal-links-with-rel-nofollow

Rand wrote a pretty thorough guide on the fundamentals of PR sculpting you might want to check out: http://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

[Jonathan_Hatton]

Hi Ruchi,

If you look at this website for an example:

http://www.campusexplorer.com/colleges/alphabet/j/

Now obviously, Google doesn't react well to pages that have thin or weak content, therefore what I am asking is would the value of deindexing the page outweigh the benefit these pages are receiving in internal link authority?

[RuchiPardal]

Well, your query is bit unclear. if you don't have any content on these pages than why do you need those pages on your website?

And if these are the categories than each category should have a proper name.

If if you have pagination on your website, like album a, album b, album c, then you should use Canonical Tag For Paginated Results