Index Pages become No-Index

[TommyTan]

Hi Mozzers,

Here is the scenario:

I created a landing page targeting Holiday keywords for the holiday season.  The page has been crawled and indexed - I see my landing page in the SERP.  However, because of the CMS layout, since the Holiday is over and I don't want it to be displayed on the homepage, i have to remove the page from hp which makes it no-index (don't ask why, it's how the CMS was built).

Question: How does this affect this LP's search?  Since it's already crawled and etc. will it still be on the SERP after i change the page to no-index? If I remove the no-index next year for the holiday season, how does this all play out?

Any insights or information provided will be appreciated.

Thank you!

[DarrenX]

If you noindex the page it will eventually be removed, but not immediately.

Why just remove it manually from Google from GWT, and also block it in your robots.txt file?

[TimKelsey]

Hi Tommy,

Pages are added/removed from the index based on Google's most recent crawl of the page. So if you set the page to no-index now, it will remain in the SERPs until Google next crawls the page and sees that a no-index attribute has been added. This could take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks depending on how often Google crawls your site.

Next year, when you remove the no-index attribute, the same thing will happen in reverse. Google won't add the page back to the index until it crawls your site again and sees that the no-index tag is no longer on that page. In this case, you might be able to get it re-added to the index very quickly by sharing it on Google+ (ref. http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations).

Hope this helps!

Tim

[TommyTan]

Hi Darren,

I don't want it to be removed but because of the CMS set up, i have to add no-index to the page when I don't want it to be on the homepage.  I understand it's confusing/weird but that's how the CMS was set up.

[TommyTan]

Hi Tim,

Understood.  In other words, once i mark it as no-index and Google crawls the page, it will be removed from the SERP even though it was crawled and indexed previously.

I just want to confirm whether it will affect the page's ranking when i re-add the index to the page next year.  Lets say Page A is ranked 3 on the SERP but since Holiday is over, i have to put no-index on the page and once Google crawl the site again, it will remove Page A from SERP.  Next year, when i re-add index tag to the page, with all the backlink and the site's authority, will it remain rank 3?  I understand many things and algorithms can change within the year but I guess my question is whether i can keep Page A will still have the same authority unlike a new page.

I hope that is clear.

[TimKelsey]

Hey Tommy,

I don't think no-indexing and re-indexing a page will have a negative effect on its ability to rank. As long as all the same ranking signals are in place (links, mentions, on-page optimization, etc.), once it is added back to the index, it should have the same strength as it did the previous year.

As you mentioned, the algorithm will most certainly change over the course of a year and you might have new competitors surface during that time, so I wouldn't expect it to rank in the same position. But your plan for dropping it from the index and re-adding should be fine.

Tim