Reducing number of thin pages on the site

[epmaniac]

Hi all,

My site is a listing site where suppliers list their products and I display them.

I use tags on my site but now I am trying to minimize the thin pages on my site.

My CMS and SEO was messed up as hell at around October 2010. I have restructured my site a lot with the help of Tedster and other people on this forum.

Now my problem/ dilemma is because of these tags, the pages are being generated with minimal content.

Would it be a good strategy to employ a delayed 301 redirect (after the querry has run and found out that the content on the page is less)... If I will implement this delayed 301 redirect, would it help?

It surely will get rid of those tags and subsequently those pages which are being generated with zero content and surely will clean the site? Wouldn't it?

[deadsea]

That doesn't sound ideal to me.

The first problem is the 301 "permanent" redirect. I would imagine that some of these tag pages would gain content over time and at some point no longer qualify for the redirect. At that point you would want to stop redirecting. 301 redirects are cached by web browsers and proxies where as 302 "temporary" redirects usually are not. For your visitors a 302 redirect would be more appropriate, but that might not pass the pagerank through those links.

Another issue from the user perspective is that a user might click on a link and actually get something different. That can't be good for user experience.

The websites I work on have policies that we never have an internal link that ends up redirecting to another page on our site. I believe that excessive in-site redirects can trigger algorithms at Google to think that your site is spam of some sort. I don't have any hard evidence to back it up, but some sites I've worked with have gotten penalized in the months following some big changes that introduced lots of redirects.

It would certainly be better to figure out if the page has content before you link to it. It sounds like the software that powers your site doesn't make this easy though.

[epmaniac]

So what should I do in my situation?

Can you lay down the steps?

[epmaniac]

You are right, the software, CMS has limitation... I cannot know before hand if a particular link (tag) has content on it... most of these tags were put by users, and now I cannot live without them, cannot live with them :(

So you are suggesting that delayed 302 redirect would be better?

Could there be any other way?

What are other people doing who face similar kind of situation?

[tedster]

Why do you even need the tags? Sound to me like you should either drop them altogether or modify the program that generates them so you don't even offer a link to thin pages.

[epmaniac]

Thanks for the reply Tedster, I was waiting for ya.

If I will remove tags, won't it hurt the PR equity of the site?... Those tags must have accumulated some equity over so many years.

Also, 301 redirection is kinda like removal, No?

Also is there any other way to remove tags without compromising on PR equity of the site...

Today again I received messaged in WMT that 'googlebots found extremely high numbers of urls'

I think this is also due to tags.

What strategy should I adopt to improve my site, without destroying the equity that I have created.

[tedster]

It's a challenge to give definitive advice when a lot of what you are saying is an educated guess rather than data for some of the critical areas.

Are there external backlinks pointing to your tag pages? Do they have visible toolbar PR? Do visitors make use of them? This kind of intelligence you can learn about definitively.

Have you tried "crawling" the site yourself, say with Xenu? If there really are spider traps, you should trip over some of them relatively quickly, even if the site is extremely large.

[epmaniac]

Thanks Ted. I understand what you are saying and am doing as per your suggestion.

One more thing.

In order to remove these tags, suppose I delete these tags from database, making them orphan..... would it help? These pages will continue to remain in google index.

Or should I employ 301 redirect on the orphan tags so that google removes them permanently?

This question is critical for my understanding, so waiting for your input

[tedster]

If you are sure that those tag pages are the reason for your problem, just plan remove them and serve a 410 Gone response. If the are only orphaned, then Google can still spider them and they become a kind of doorway page - that's worse. Why try to hold on to something that doesn't help your visitors and hurts you in Google?

Have you watched this video? Do Tag Clouds Help or Hinder SEO? [youtube.com] Get the feeling of it, don't just listen for the "recipe".

[serenoo]

Tedster, I have a lot of orphaned pages with poor content. I would remove them, but I read here that if I quickly remove all at once those pages I could lose more positions in serps. Is this true?

[tedster]

I never read that report about removing orphaned pages, only lots of interlinked content. Can you give a reference?

[walkman]

Tedster, I have a lot of orphaned pages with poor content. I would remove them, but I read here that if I quickly remove all at once those pages I could lose more positions in serps. Is this true?

Well, you will lose any traffic those pages brought, that's for sure but you gotta think long term. Google has said that we need to remove 'bad' pages to improve the domain's ranking.

Straight from Google:
<sub>"Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don't want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that's copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful.

In addition, it's important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site's ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you've been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.</sub>

[tangor]

Google 1: "These a-holes a churning out more krap than we can index!"
Google 2: "Yup. Costing time and money and the Head Honcho is not going to be happy. After all, we said we index THE ENTIRE WEB."
Google 1: "But do we really have to? I mean, after all, 99% is regurgitated spin krap coming out so fast we can't tell who krapped first!"
Google 2: "Hmmm... That's right. Even the Users know that. Hey! Brilliant! We call those 'thin pages and content farms' and penalize them! We can dump...what...10-12% all at once! How kewl is that?"
Google 1: "Think the webmaster community will buy that?"
Google 2: "Why knot (sic)? They buy everything else we sell them."
Google 1: "Gee, that sounds like social engineering to me."
Google 2: "Exactly... and we are the engineers."

(Overhead at a tin-foil hat conspiracy meeting near you...)

[serenoo]

Tedster I read it here
[webmasterworld.com...]
message number 4288121 from walkman.
Probably reading more carefully is it a joke?

[Robert Charlton]

"These a-holes a churning out more krap than we can index!"

The rate at which new content is being added to the web is most definitely a concern, and it's not just a concern about the head honcho and profit margins.

It's a concern about how Google (or any system) can include new data, return results, and keep such a huge database system usable... and yes, "krap" does make that a lot harder.

Nothing tinfoil hat or conspiracy based about this... it's an acknowledged fact that's widely discussed among database engineers.

[tedster]

Probably reading more carefully is it a joke?

Yes - you've got to watch out for those smilie faces

[walkman]

Tedster, I have a lot of orphaned pages with poor content. I would remove them, but I read here that if I quickly remove all at once those pages I could lose more positions in serps. Is this true?

Google said to delete them, so I doubt they'll penalize us for that. What happened to me is this:
Went through each page and deleted what I saw as thin, without looking at stats or rankings. So I lost traffic those pages would have gotten from Google and from BingHoo. Hopefully at the next shakeup I get way more form the pages I left.

[indyank]

walkman, google had different rules for different sites...so don't trust or rely on whatever they say...

[snickles121]

I have been reducing my number of thin pages by adding better content to those pages. I have not seen any improvement by Google yet, but I am seeing my home page jump up for keywords in bing.

[walkman]

I have been reducing my number of thin pages by adding better content to those pages. I have not seen any improvement by Google yet, but I am seeing my home page jump up for keywords in bing.

Same here snickles, Google traffic has either gone down another 30-40% since panda of Bing has increased. Too sad to check it in more detail, but Bing brings me money keywords, Google sends me people searching for something that is mentioned once in a long, long page.

The bottom line is that no matter how bad my sites was before Panda, now it's much better, yet Google doesn't care, and is only decreasing my traffic. maybe Panda is loose and told to ignore any changes for a while? Since this is my livelihood and have been hurt a lot, I am looking like a madman in forums. But no one so far has come out of Panda on their own, at least as far as I can tell.