Pages with Little Content

[andywozhere]

I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed.

I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed.

Here is an example page with very little content

[SEOBrent]

Hi Andy,

First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most likely links to them? ( And if not how would users find these otherwise? )

After looking at your example page what if you made a unique description for each artist / performer and then have a list of events that is always changing under them that way you have some type of unique content that would be helpful.

-Brent

[andywozhere]

_First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most _

likely links to them?

Actually there are only currently links to the pages with an actual 

description. I have disabled links to those with no description. The

way the site is set up at the moment means that a page is created, 

but not necessarily linked to

(see [http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/live-music](http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/live-music)). 

_After looking at your example page what if you made a unique _

_description for each artist / performer and then have a list _

_of events that is always changing under them that way you have _

_some type of unique content that would be helpful._

I think I'd have the same problem there would still be thousands of

artists (nevermind festivals etc).  I do want to list as many events

as possible and I think my users would prefer a comprehensive number

of listings without descriptions rather than a small number of event 

listings with descriptions. Some listings do have more substantial

descriptions e.g. [St Patrick's Day in Dublin](http://www.dublinbynumbers.com/events/arts-culture/festivals/st-patricks-festival-and-parade "St Patrick's Day")

My overall question is should I prevent Google from indexing pages

with little content (as the original example) or just let it 

do it's thang au naturale?

[SEOwins]

Hi As Brent has said you cannot prevent Google from crawling the site. Once the site is indexed and Google starts to visit the site more frequently it is likely at some point to find the pages. However, based on the limited information and more importantly the lack of any real unique content i would advise that you take what ever steps you can from limiting the visibility of these pages. I do not believe you will lose rank but you certainly will not gain any. Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

If you've already cut internal links and they're only in RSS, I probably would NOINDEX them, personally. You're basically telling Google that they're low-value (for now, at least) but then you're letting them be [possibly] indexed and potentially diluting the rest of your index (and ranking power). That way, people can still access them, but you're not risking Panda issues or other problems.

Over time, as you add content and boost your domain authority and link profile, you can start phasing in more pages.