Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index

[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