Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index

[irvingw]

Hey folks,

How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls.

These pages are super low competition.

The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal)

a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned.

b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them?

c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned?

d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google.

Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info.

[UnderRugSwept]

I have no hard evidence, but if it were my site, I would do option C but keep an eye on what happens, and if I noticed anything strange happening, I would implement option B. But if option C makes you nervous, I see no reason you couldn't or shouldn't noindex them right off the bat.

That's merely one person's opinion, however.

[SEO5Team]

In my opinion, add the 150k pages in the site map along with the 300k pages, let Google index all the pages and once they are all indexed , you can take a call on de indexing the 150k pages based on their traction.

[irvingw]

Hmmm. I am leaning towards the following solution since I would rather be on the cautious side, maybe this makes sense?

a) we noindex these 300k orphaned pages and do not submit sitemap.xml files

b)  we experiment with say 10,000 pages and we allow only those to get indexed and submit sitemap.xml files for them

c) we closely monitor their indexing and ranking performance so we can determine if these are even worth opening up to Google and taking any risk.

[UnderRugSwept]

That's a good idea. 10,000 Is still a lot. You could even test fewer than 10,000 pages. Why not try 1,000?

[irvingw]

we definitely want the 150k in the index since they are legitimate pages and linked to on the site. it's the 300k of orphaned ones we have to take along as a package deal that i am worried about. too many orphaned pages for Google.

[irvingw]

yea submitting sitemap.xml files for 300k pages that are not part of the site seems a bit obnoxious.

[irvingw]

Yea 1000 is probably a big enough sample.

10,000 seems like a lot i guess but not when you've got a site with 4.5 million pages.

[UnderRugSwept]

Yikes, I didn't know the site was that big. Still, if you're afraid of how Google would "react" to those orphaned pages, I'd still test small, regardless of how large your overall site is.

[SEM-Freak]

I'd go back to the drawing board and rework your strategy.

Do you need additional sites? 150K orphaned pages you want indexed sounds spammy or poor site architecture to me.

[irvingw]

it's not a strategy, it's due to technical limitations on the dev side. i agree though thanks.

So, I asked this question to a very advanced SEO guru and he said they could be seen as doorways and present some risk and advised against it. That combined with the probability that they will most likely get dropped from Google's index anyway and we know that Google says they want pages to be part of the sites architecture has me leaning towards nofollowing all of them and maybe experiment with allowing 1000 to get indexed and see what happens with them.

Thanks for your input folks