Indexing More Pages by NOINDEX-ing irrelevant pages

Is NOINDEX-ing off-theme pages helpful in indexing?

[menial]

Let's assume you have 10K pages about widgets divided into 5 different categories. Something like:

Blue Widgets - 2K pages
Black Widgets - 2K pages
White Widgets - 2K pages
Red Widgets - 2K pages
Off-Topic pages (like customer chit-chat or introductions) not related to Widgets - 2K pages

Does it make sense to put NOINDEX on the Off-topic pages? My theory is that Google gives preferences to the web pages that are on the web site's general theme (Widgets). As result, allowing it to index off-topic pages is like wasting your potential to index more Widget-related pages. So if I put NOINDEX on the Off-topic pages the chances that Google indexes all Widget pages will increase.

Am I wrong again? :)

[edited by: tedster at 7:19 pm (utc) on Nov. 6, 2007]

[tedster]

I'd say you have a decent idea. When Matt Cutts recently talked about using rel="nofollow" for some internal links on a domain, he extended the idea to include using noindex meta tags as well. I know several people who fell they've imporved their results with this approach.

[menial]

Yes, it seems Google wants to "categorize" your web site to some theme and diluting theme isn't going to bring you visitors interested in your main theme anyway. It seems that focusing on your site's theme (ie. allowing Google to index only on-theme pages) is like protecting your pagerank from passing it to useless web pages or external websites.

[g1smd]

Related point: when looking at a forum I put noindex on everything except the thread index pages and the threads themselves.

Bots do not index any of the "reply to thread", "send PM", "member list", "post new topic", "logon" or any other such page at all.

[menial]

Related question: do you put nofollow on anchor links like: <a href="myLink#" rel="nofollow">Anchor Link</a>. I guess Google cannot and won't index such links, but still it would make sense to put nofollow there..

Second question: What if other sites link to your NOINDEX pages - will you still get the same benefit (pagerank) as if the page was set as INDEX... And then - do the NOINDEX pages actually fully pass pagerank to your other pages?

[tedster]

#1 Google says they will completely drop a rel="nofollow" link from their map of the web. But if another url anywhere else links to that target page, then the target page itself can still be indexed, accrue PR, and so on.

#2 If other sites link to a page that uses a noindex meta tag, then that page can still accumulate PR. It can even show in search results, but the information shown will not come from the page content. It often shows the url-only. You can, however, request a complete removal through the removal tool using the meta tag method.

[menial]

Thanks for very valuable answers above..

But still I don't think it's possible to index anchor link, like (note the # sign in the link - like going down of up of the page):

<a href="myLink#pgdown">Go Bottom of page</a>

?

[jdMorgan]

You are correct. Named anchors are handled only by browsers, and are never sent to a server with a request or included in search engine listings.

Jim

[Tonearm]

Is <meta name="robots" content="none" /> still a good alternative to NOINDEX?

[tedster]

That is the equivalent of "noindex, nofollow". It also instructs robots not to follow links on the page as well as not to index the content.

Allowable values for the content attribute of the robots meta tag are: none, noindex, nofollow, all, index, and follow. If you are using more than one of these values - noindex, nofollow, index, and follow - they should be separated by a comma. The values "all" and "none" are stand-alone.

[Insomniak]

I was also thinking of noindexing some pages to point google to more relevant search results.

I sell widges organized like this:

blue widges >> round blue widgets >> plastic round blue widget

Google has been matching the subcategory right but often gets the individual widget wrong so I want to deindex the individual products so users will land on the subcategory page.

My problem is this, the site is not well indexed and lots of those indexed pages are the products I want to de-index. If I hide them will google pull some of my other pages out of supplemental to compensate or will I be left with hardly anything indexed at all?

[gyppo]

I've used this very successfully on a few forums by noindexing the Member Pages. Thus allowing much more content to start ranking :)

[menial]

I've used this very successfully on a few forums by noindexing the Member Pages. Thus allowing much more content to start ranking :)

Google does a good job recognizing and respecting the NOINDEX tag. When it comes to MSN, however... - today I noticed they managed to index and include into their search results over 100 of member-only and NOINDEX pages (actually, they took the snippet text from the member pages but when you are not a member and click on the link it provides "Access denied - for members only" message). How ridiculous is that? :)