Should I block non-informative pages from Google's index?

[UnderRugSwept]

Our site has about 1000 pages indexed, and the vast majority of them are not useful, and/or contain little content. Some of these are:

-Galleries
-Pages of images with no text except for navigation
-Popup windows that contain further information about something but contain no navigation, and sometimes only a couple sentences

My question is whether or not I should put a noindex in the meta tags.

I think it would be good because the ratio of quality to low quality pages right now is not good at all.

I am apprehensive because if I'm blocking more than half my site from Google, won't Google see that as a suspicious or bad practice?

[Highland]

I'm not a fan of this (commonly called page rank shaping). First, you're trying to tell Google what to index and what to ignore. Second, how do you know those pages have no value? What if I found an image in your gallery and linked to it off my blog? Now you're missing out on link juice. It might not be viewed as suspicious, but it won't help your site any.

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Marisa,

To determine which pages should be noindexed, first ask yourself first whether a user would want to land on the URL in question. Second, is the URL receiving traffic as an organic landing page right now? Third, does the content serve a purpose to the user? Does it need to exist?

If the answer to all of the above questions is "no," then go ahead and noindex the page. If you answer yes to one of the above, some evaluation is in order. Can you add content, improve the navigation and appearance, or make the page more useful rather than noindexing it?

Generally you can enhance gallery pages for search engines and users by labeling/captioning the images and making sure the alt text is in order. On category pages, add some content, label products, and provide them with a next action.

Do the popups contain useful, non-repeating, or important info? If so, can the content be placed on the page somewhere instead? The only way I would use a popup and noindex it is if the content in the popup is optional and duplicated, such as the often-seen "What's This?" that explains a field or term that is repeated across the site, and each instance makes a new URL.

I've never heard of anyone running into problems with Google for noindexing too much stuff. You're essentially just telling them that the page is not good for users to find. You will, however, tend to improve organic traffic and user experience by making each page useful and adding an appropriate amount of content.

Hope that helps,

Carson

[UnderRugSwept]

Thanks for that great information. This is a good example of what I'm taking about:

http://www.stadriemblems.com/scouting/neckerchiefs/index.htm

Under "Plain Neckerchief" click on "view pricelist" or "color chart"

So, you think a better practice would be to just include that pricelist on the same page instead?

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

Sorry I didn't see this when I posted. PR sculpting generally refers to the practice of using internal nofollows - which I'm not a fan of either, not least because it doesn't work. I also agree that pages that users could find useful should generally remain in the index.

[Carson-Ward]

When it comes to popups, keep in mind that some users' popup blockers might prevent these from even loading. As is, I don't think it matters much whether you noindex these price list pages or not. You certainly could, as they're not going to appear in any search result, and they're not going to attract links.

I would play with ways to improve the user experience, but putting the large tables on the page probably isn't the way to do that. To me, I think a better option would be (somewhere above the fold) allowing the user to select the type (plain/patched/etc.) quantity, and other variables. They would then get a price quote (as on the bottom of the page), along with a button to continue the checkout process or otherwise continue to the next step. I'd also display the original price per item crossed out, the phrase "bulk discounts" somewhere close, and then the new price per item.

Telling people what they need to do next (it took me a while to find where to buy) and simplifying the pricing at the same time could help a lot. I also noticed that the price quote on the contact page seems to be loading inside the same cramped frame.

[Highland]

I know PR shaping is most commonly done with nofollows but the same core principle holds: you don't want the spiders to do something out of fear that you're "diluting" the site's value. Doing it with noindex is just as bad as nofollow, if not worse.

[minutiae]

More a technical answer than SEO-specific, but you could place the pop up content in a lightbox similar to your gallery items with a script like http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/, colorbox, etc. These will allow you to lightbox on page content in addition to just photos.

So you could technically have the price table displayed in the page for non-javascript enabled clients, and the lightbox script would show it when clicked, and you wouldn't have to worry about pop-up blockers or having the popup content be a separate page.

[EGOL]

I would discriminate these pages on the basis of income or search engine traffic rather than use their informativeness.

I have semiinformative pages that pull lots of traffic and make lots of money - and informative pages that make next to nothing.

[UnderRugSwept]

To the spiders, would the content in the lightbox be considered on the page?