Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
"Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
- 
					
					
					
					
Hey there Mozzers,
I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow" on these pages. What do you think?
Has someone faced this situation before?
Will appreciate your input!
 - 
					
					
					
					
+1 to EGOL and Ginaluca. We need more information about that pages.
In any case, if we are talking about thin content, but if is quality content and it's not duplicated content or oriented-for-SEO content, I would not use noindex for it.
If we ar talking about empty pages or almost empty pages maybe is better to use noindex, or maybe is better to delete and redirect with 301 this pages.
I would reduce the internal linking, and maybe put those internal links lower or in places with less visibility. Just that.
Greetings!
 - 
					
					
					
					
EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.
That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.
It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).
So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.
p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.
 - 
					
					
					
					
If you want good responses to this question, then post more about these pages (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, purpose of pages, etc.) and more about your site (current content, how many, current traffic, current rankings, recent problems, etc.).
Questions with little information are often ignored by people who might know a lot about the subject because they don't want to guess, they don't want to think about and write about all possible cases, put their effort into a question when the poster didn't put much of his own effort into explaining.
Also, who are you? Owner? Employee? SEO? Are you the guy who put these pages up and didn't put any content on them? The guy who paid for the skinny content that is currently up there and needs to have input on yanking them down or paying for proper content?
 
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
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Should i Noindex my privacy policy page?:
Hi, We have a privacy policy page but it can be found at Copyscape and might affect Google Panda content farming. My questions is, should i Noindex my private policy page?:
Technical SEO | | chanel270 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
404 crawl errors from "tel:" link?
I am seeing thousands of 404 errors. Each of the urls is like this: abc.com/abc123/tel:1231231234 Everything is normal about that url except the "/tel:1231231234" these urls are bad with the tel: extension, they are good without it. The only place I can find this character string is on each page we have this code which is used for Iphones and such. What are we doing wrong? Code: Phone: <a href="[tel:1231231234](tel:7858411943)"> (123) 123-1234a>
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
Hi, 3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google. I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy". So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards? Thanks, Sven
Technical SEO | | Zitana0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0