Are too many (millions) noindex/canonical pages bad for SEO?

[dangngocdolan]

Hello all, my case is in QA category of a hospital. Every month, there are around 500 questions which the customers submit to our website, and the director asks to publish all of the questions with the answer from the doctor.

If it still continues, there will be thousands of QA urls. However, there are a lot of QA urls with nearly the same content or question or title of question. Therefore, I am afraid that CANNIBALIZATION will take place. So how to solve it without causing harms to SEO? I got two ideas:

1. I supposed that noindex or cannonical tag to TOO MANY (for examples 500,000 QA urls) are BAD to SEO or not? Is there any public information from Google?
2. I will edit each of the QA urls to add internal links to the seo QA/post to transfer link juice and navigate Google bot, in order to avoid cannibalization.

Please note that,
Some of the QA urls will be kept it normally indexed since I also rank some keywords for them. Therefore, some SEO QA wil be kept indexed for ranking low competitive keywords (like questions...) and the multitle others will be NOINDEXED OR CANONICALED if I choose FIRST option.
My boss asks to publish all questions seperately because each situation of patient is quite different (despite that the main purpose is the same). If possible, I will combine, but I can not.

[JesterMagic]

I would differentiate the questions as much as you can, it sounds like that maybe to a degree they already are since you said each situation of patient is quite different which leads me to believe that all the answers are different. Can you add maybe something like tags or keywords to the questions which would highlight the differences better and then I would leave them all with their own canonicals. At some point the questions which resonate with visitors will be linked back to more and those will rise in the rankings on their own.

If the questions and answers are all pretty much the same then the hospital needs to just refer patients to the appropriate question/answer that already exists (and stop wasting someones time re-answering the same question). If they refuse then you will just have to noindex the questions you do not want to show up and if you cant do that then the hospital will just have to live the SEO consequences of choosing to have very similar content. Sometimes the client or your boss can't have it both ways.

[lammert]

My boss asks to publish all questions seperately because each situation of patient is quite different

This is the keypart of your situation. If the answers on the questions are given by experts in their field (which I assume they are, given the context you give of the hospital and doctors) each question and answer deserves their unique place in the SERPs.

What you as an SEO optimizer think of the answers doesn't matter. You cannot rate the content quality, because you are no expert in the field of the content.

Sites must be developed for human visitors, not for the search engines. Google is increasingly able to detect if it is the first or latter situation. Trying to redirect juice (if that works at all in 2021) by using canonical tags, noindex etc, is an indication of spam techniques on a site which through its nature (hospital site with doctor responses) should carry its value purely through their content.

[FranticFish]

As long as the answers are as unique as the questions then I would not worry about the number of pages. Instead, I would look for patterns and try to see if I could find a way of grouping closely related questions.

You might find that people ask the same question in lots of different ways but the answers are similar. This is because the question is about symptoms and the same ailment could have multiple symptoms. It is also likely that people might ask questions that seem the same, but the answers are different because there is an overlap in the symptoms from one ailment to another.

Given that the site is for those asking rather than those answering I would focus on trying to find relationships between the questions.

If this is a time drain then just leave it and let Google decide what they will or will not index.

But if you do have time to spend then I would recommend that you spend it helping people who are asking similar questions to see those related answers as well as their own. By doing that you add value, and THAT is the metric you want to be focused on.

Don't try to optimise the content. Instead, try to organise and curate it.

[londrum]

i was wondering this a few years ago because i've got an events section on my site, and a couple of weeks after the events are over i noindex the page. as the years have gone by the number of noindexed pages on my site has grown into the thousands and outweighed the number of indexed pages. in the end it was decided it wasnt a problem. deleting them is a bad idea because you might lose a load of backlinks

but i do make sure there are no internal links to them because that is just wasting your crawl budget. but you probably cant do that with yours

[NickMNS]

deleting them is a bad idea because you might lose a load of backlinks

No-indexing, means that the pages are removed from the index and thus any links appearing on those pages are also removed. As a result links into those pages effectively lead to nowhere and will not pass link-juice. Which ultimately means that it is equivalent (in terms of backlinks) to deleting those pages.

[lammert]

Correct @NickMNS. To stop link juice distribution manipulation, Google decided some years ago [webmasterworld.com] that all of the links on a noindex page will effectively have the value of nofollow.

Noindex-ed pages have no search engine value and if link paths traverse through them to indexed pages, these noindex-ed pages work effectively as absorbents of valuable link power.

[londrum]

i didnt know that... that's a bit annoying.
i guess that answers the dangngocdolan's question then - noindex would be a bad idea. but you could probably find a way to consolidate lots of similar questions onto one page

[ps. i just noticed that i replied on that thread you linked to from a few years ago, so i must have forgotten!]