Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
-
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking).
I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content.
My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
-
Yes, Google will give you credit for adding value to pages. You must have them crawled as a Googlebot immediately after no indexing is removed.
Your no indexing will pass page rank of thin content could save you potentially from a penalty however if you have a better page redirected to that page using a 301.
You will not receive the existing traffic if your ranking for that keyword at all if you noindex it. Well, you'll lose a lot of it until it's fixed.
You will have more trouble ranking for that keyword if you remove the page from Google's index. However, if you feel your content is that thin I would recommend no indexing them if you are going to fix them. And you must be willing to fix them extremely soon. How are you going to rank for a term Organically if you no index it you will hurt it that is not currently getting traffic?
A NoIndex tag is an instruction to the search engines that you don’t want a page to be kept within their search results. You should use this when you believe you have a page that search engines might consider being of poor quality.
What does a noindex tag do?
- It is a directive, not a suggestion. I.e., Google will obey it, and not index the page.
- The page can still be crawled by Google.
- The page can still accumulate PageRank.
- The page can still pass PageRank via any links on the page.
(PageRank, in reality_, there are a lot of other signals that are potentially passed through any link. Better to say “signals passed” than “PageRank passed.”)_
Crawl frequency of a noindex page will decline over time.
Crawl frequency refers to how often Google returns to a page to check whether the page still exists, has any changes, and has accumulated or lost signals.
Typically crawl frequency will decline for any page that Google cannot index, for whatever reason. Google will try to recrawl a few times to check if the noindex, error, or whatever was blocking the crawl, is gone or fixed.
If the noindex instruction remains, Google will slowly start to lengthen the time to the next attempt to crawl the page, eventually reducing to a check about every two-to-three months to see if the no index tag is still there.
The no index page will be excluded from Google's search index, So it will not help you rank for that term unless you have other pages that are cannibalizing it and trying to rank for that term as well. If so 301 redirect the poor content page to the right content page.
Your question on page rank and no index yes page rank can accrue Google will still read the page. They will derive some information from the hypertext inside the URLs.
Before you remove content
The following are some guidelines you can use:
- Make an educated (non-biased) judgement: Is your content’s quality “worse” than this content?
- Do you cover the topic in enough length and sufficiently in-depth?
- Which aspects of this content is your page not covering completely?
- Which “user intent” queries is your content not answering?
- How can you make your content better?
- Can you use any great imagery or diagrams to supplement your content?
- Are there any YouTube or other videos which can add value to your content.
Iterate and do the above for all of the pages which are outranking yours. The first few are going to be the hardest — it’s likely that the rest will follow a similar pattern.
There are no short cuts. You’ll have to review all the pages which are outranking you to ensure you leave no gaps.
Update Your Content To Fully Answer The User Search Query
Once you’ve seen what you are up against, you need to update your content.
To put it simply, your content needs to be better than the competition. It also needs to fully answer the user search intent which we have identified previously.
Make it the BEST content out there.
Given that you’ve already analyzed your competitors’ content, you should have a pretty good idea of what your content is missing.
Supplement your existing content with that additional content, but
- Don’t rewrite it completely. You’ll likely lose the precious content that Google was ranking you for.
- Don’t write a new post with the hope that this will rank better. It’s a much longer and harder journey than pushing up your already existing content.
- Of course, don’t change the URL.
As discovered in this case study 468% traffic increase case study, Google will reward you for your efforts.
Use the judgment calls from your competitive research to plan what needs to be added or updated.
Enhance it with any missing content
While looking at the organic keywords which you are ranking for you might come across user search intent keywords for which you have no content.
Let’s say, for example; your content discusses enabling Joomla SEF URLs.
If in your research you find that you are ranking for “disabling Joomla SEF URLs,” make sure that your refreshed content answers that query also.
These queries are pure gold — make sure you are answering them
You can see a larger version of the photos below here
Reference
- http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/duplicate-content-problems/#thin-content-classifier
- https://www.stonetemple.com/gary-illyes-what-is-noindex-and-what-does-it-do/
- https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
** when rebuilding**
- https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building/
- https://mza.bundledseo.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
- http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/what-is-pagerank/
this is similar because it addresses turning off pages and turning them back on
I hope this helps,
Tom
-
From a Google perspective if you noindex a page sooner or later it will be removed from the index and hence you will lose your search term.
If you have no particular need to remove the pages, create new pages with the new content (Google will like that anyway), almost certainly you will find that some of those pages will outrank the thin content pages by definition in time.
In due course you could then 301 the old link which in theory will pass on most of the authority to the new page.
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
-
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Can we talk a bit more about cannibalisation? Will Google pick one page and disregard others.
Hi all. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently. Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'. Take a look here. Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc. Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'. **And our home page outranks it for this search term. **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails. Question: Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page? And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'? (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon) But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Also, what would you do in this scenario? Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page? Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Hope that makes sense. Do shout if not. Thanks in advance. Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6630 -
Sitemaps and dynamic pages
Hi all, I have a gigantic website and they are adding another subdirectory to it. My question is regarding html sitemaps for better optimisation. 1. Should a keyword focussed front end (html) sitemap be made for all the dynamic URLs or 2. Should a category focussed front end (html) sitemap be made for all the dynamic URLs what would be your approach to doing a sitemap with thousands of pages with a structure like Directory > Sub directory > Subdirectory > Files
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Forum generating automatically extra pages. Can I solve it with canonical?
Hey there Webmasters of the Universe. So i have this problem with my forum. The platform I am using it automatically creates extra pages for every page. For exampleIf my forum had one page called forum.com/examplethe same page you can find at forum.com/example?page=1If I set rel canonical into the second one pointing to the first one will that cause a problem for me?Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Rel=author, google plus, picture in Article page SERP
Hello, Could someone explain the easiest way to use Google Plus and rel="author" to claim our articles written by us and get our picture beside them in the Google SERPS site: nlpca(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Page titles
Hi Guys, Hope your all well and business is good. I have been going through and changing page titles for my site which is currently huge attracting massive amounts of traffic. However from my pro membership i have notice a lot of the rankings in Google search engine has decreased. I have been using a strategy that i read on SEOMoz which is; example Keyword | Page heading | company name Is this why? if so what is the best method? I have changed nothing else so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850