Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?
-
I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before...
I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page.
Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly...
Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration?
By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!
-
Sorry to take so long to respond; I wanted to wait until the child pages had dropped out of the index, in case I had any follow up Q's. Everything's looking good so far, and it seems all the links to any individual views of child pages have now been removed.
BTW, great post on WP and SEO, Dan!
Thanks again!
-
OK so what I would do there is;
1. Add meta noindex tags to the child pages.
2. Wait for them to drop out of the index (check for them every week or so with site: searches or cache:)
3. When they get noindexed, then add rel = nofollow to the links within the HTML that points to those child pages so they stop getting crawled in the future. You can leave the noindex in place if you want.
-
I can indeed get cache for the child pages... (However, I'm using the free version of Screaming Frog, so I'm not seeing what I'm looking for there in the top 500 links)
The sitemap contains the only links (that I can see) to these child pages, so if I managed to change that, would that prevented them from being crawled? Or are search engine spiders going to "find" those pages because they were indexed previously, and I'll need to noindex them?
Thanks!
-
Then you don't have nothing to do, nothing to noindex, as actually there are no extra pages. Is just one script that includes extra scripts "behind the scenes".
-
Hey There - glad you're enjoying the forums!
So if the tabbed "child" pages can not be crawled and indexed individually you have nothing to worry about. Are they indexed? Can you get cache for them by typing cache:www.yoursite.com/page-name ?
You can test crawling by using Screaming Frog. If the tabbed child pages do not show up when you crawl the site, you probably don't need to do anything.
If they ARE crawlable, then yes I would noindex them.
-
The pages in the tabs are being loaded into the parent page directly via PHP, so they are rendered directly into the HTML of the parent.
-
How are the pages in the tabs being loaded? iframes? Ajax? In both cases, they shouldn't be noindexed if they offer valuable content that can't be accessed from another page.
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
-
More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages
So my question is... I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword. I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same). What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so. The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging. What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect? Any help would be great. Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1231 -
What to do with repetitive content
Hi, I recently took over a site from another SEO firm. They created lots of articles targeting the same terms. The articles aren't bad but I fear they could dilute the site's ranking power for a given term. I don't want to give away the specific industry, but let's say they have eight pages targeting the term "______ billing software." I'd rather focus their resources on ranking one page for that term. Does that make sense? And if so, how do I do that? The company has a writer that can see if any of the content is good enough to add to their primary ______ billing software page. Would you 301 redirect all these pages to the one you want to rank, or would you canonicalize them? Or am I way off base in my thinking?
On-Page Optimization | | rich.owings0 -
Should I include unnecessary pages in the sitemap.xml
I have a lot of pages that I don't want Google to index, so for most of them, I used cannonical, were they were duplicates, noindex were I wanted to remove the pages, but the question is: Should I include these pages in the sitemap.xml, or just the important pages? Also should I include them in order to get the changes indexed fastet by Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Ratings pages are Duplicate Content
This brought up another question. should the review page (which now has a canonical to the item page) be Index,follow? My item review pages are showing up with Duplicate Content errors in MOZ. Here are two examples http://www.americanmusical.com/ItemReview--i-HAM-SK1-LIST http://www.americanmusical.com/ItemReview--i-MAC-203680902-LIST is the problem that the pages contain the same code and questions with very little customer created info?
On-Page Optimization | | dianeb1520 -
Content in Tabs
I speed read an article recently and forgot to save it regarding Contents on a page in tabs. Is it correct that now Google is rendering the entire page it's better not to have content in tabs hidden by Javascript? As it stands at the moment, we've got the tabs set-up so that the main part of the page containing the keyword rich text is in a tab and not the first thing presented to the user
On-Page Optimization | | Ham19790 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Product Attribute pages and Duplicate content
Hiya I have two queries is about a jewellery shop running on wordpress and woocommerce. 1. I am a little indecisive on how to index the product categories without creating duplicate pages which will get me into trouble. For example: All earrings are listed on the category page: chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ We also have product attribute pages which lists all the subcategories for the earrings: chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/creoles/
On-Page Optimization | | bongoheads
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/drop/
chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/studs/ I have the category URL and the product attribute URLs set to be indexed on my sitemaps. Will this get me into trouble creating duplicate content with the main category page? Should I only have the main category indexed and "no-index, follow" all the product attribute pages? 2. I am also thinking about incorporating these product attribute URLS into my menu so when people hover over earrings they get shown the types of earrings they can buy. However, I have the woocommerce faceted navigation working on the category pages. So if someone is visiting the page chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/ The user can click on the left hand side, and select "drops". The URL they will get though is one which is not indexed: http://www.chainsofgold.co.uk/buy/earrings/?filter_earrings=123 Can I link to those product attribute pages without the risk of getting accused of creating duplicate content? Thank you for your help. Carolina0 -
Getting page cached
I am reworking some content that is deep in my site. What is the best way for google to find it? Some of the pages were cached about 3 weeks ago, but I don't want to wait too long to get them to see the new content (and links).
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0