Thin content in 600k URLs-site. 'Canonical' pointing to main pages?

[guarriman3]

Hi,

I manage a website with 200,000+ products. Initially, for each one of the products, I created a main page under the URL 'https://mydomain/info/xxxxx', where 'xxxxx' is the unique label for each product. It shows data such as a title, a long description, sizes, weight, features, etc.

Some years ago, I decided to create two additional separate URLs for each product:

'https://mydomain/photos/xxxxx'
'https://mydomain/reviews/xxxxx'

They are linked from the main page of each product, each one of the URLs offer unique content and --IMHO-- valuable information. However, it's true that some of the review pages are still empty, and I did not create long texts for the main pages, apart from H2 sections with the caption "Description:" or "Size:" and a few additional words.

So I started to be considered as 'thin content' by Google, with the consequent crawl budget issues, deindexation of thousand of URLs, 'jeopardization' of my keywords, etc.

In order to cope with all these issues, I wondered if I could include, within each one of the 'photos' and 'reviews' pages, a 'canonical' metatag pointing to the main page. This is:

https://mydomain/photos/xxxxx ---> {canonical} ---> https://mydomain/info/xxxxx
https://mydomain/reviews/xxxxx ---> {canonical} ---> https://mydomain/info/xxxxx

I want my users to visit these different two web pages of each product, since I don't want to include all the stuff within the same URL (it would be too dense). Additionally, I prefer to include ads in different webpages, because they are more efficient.

Does this strategy make sense for you? Any other options? Thank you in advance.

[getcooking]

In my opinion, this is a very poor strategy.

First off, it's an improper use of the canonical tag. The canonical should only be used when the content is very similar, which you have said it is not. Also, Google has said the canonical tag is a "hint", not a directive, so you may not have the intended results from using it. I can attest to this firsthand.

What I would do is noindex the photos and reviews pages. I would improve the content on the main product pages (since you said those are shoddy), including maybe some of the photos and some of the reviews with links to the additional pages. It sounds like you are just trying to get people to increase pageviews for advertising revenue which isn't a good user experience and Google is going to notice that.

[guarriman3]

including maybe some of the photos and some of the reviews with links to the additional pages

It's a good idea, I started to include a sort of "teaser" with 2 photos and 2 reviews, and then a link to the 'photos' and 'reviews' pages.

What I would do is noindex the photos and reviews pages

I started to test it in a pair of specific URLs by inserting:

 <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

However, the Adsense ads are not shown on such pages. I guess that I am telling "adsensebot" not to crawl my pages, right?

It sounds like you are just trying to get people to increase pageviews for advertising revenue

Honestly, I would like to increase pageviews by inviting users to visit the rest of the pages when they land of the main ones. But a lot of users search for "photos of xxxx" and "reviews of xxxx", and I decided to bet on turning up in all the searches, although I have seen that it is a mistake.

Thank you again :-)

[NickMNS]

@garriman3
Spreading content over several pages in order to increase ad impressions is a bad idea, mainly because as you have discovered it doesn't work. In my experience users are very reluctant to click to the next page. It is a big ask, so you really need to provide something compelling, photos, more photos and reviews don't reach that bar. More importantly, there is really no reason for it, not anymore, back in the day when there was 3 ad per page limit, there was justification to do it, but that is no longer the case.

As you have also realized, spreading content thins the content as a whole, potentially leading to lower ranking from Google.

I would recommend that you merge your 3 pages into 1, you can simply have the original page content, followed by photos and then reviews. Then place your ads within the content, but don't over do it. Just be sure that the ads are in view of the most consumed content. Be sure to lazy loads your ads that are further down the page, there is no point in loading an ad that nobody sees, it will slow your page load and reduce your AVV metric. Note that scrolling down a page is also a pretty big ask, not as big as going to the next page but still, so not all users will visit the entire page so only load the ads have a high likelihood of being seen.

You should also lazy load your images.

As for the pages you are getting rid of, photo and review pages, 301 redirect each one to the its respective main page. Like that any links that may be pointing to an image or review will boost the page rank of the main page.

One final thought, having a big pages with lots of content can be an issue for mobile users, nobody likes a pages that is stacked vertically for miles. Think of using carousels for your image and reviews such that can swipe horizontally to see some of the content, it makes things less 1 dimensional.

[not2easy]

It does not hurt to use anchor text like "photos of xxxx" and "reviews of xxxx" for your links to the noindexed photo pages and review pages on the product page where you link to those pages. There is nothing wrong with using similar wording in the meta descriptions of those noindexed pages. Those would be accurate descriptions of the content of those auxiliary pages. The bots don't care for spammy "keyword" stuffed descriptions but expanding on your links' anchor text is helpful, to differentiate similar content.

Because these additional pages are in their own directories, (/photos/, /reviews/) you do not need to have a robots metatag on each page, you can use X-Robots to noindex the entire direcotories. If you are not familiar with how to implement a directory wide X-Robots header, it is by adding a few lines to your .htaccess file. To see how with examples see this older thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

[guarriman3]

Hi @NickMNS,

Thank you very much for your kind and educational answer.

I started to do changes on my website following the tips you gave. They make sense, and I'm experiencing that spreading content is hurting my Google ranking.

I was already serving ads and images in a lazy way. I started to do it to improve my PageSpeed Insight metrics