Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?

[rsigg]

I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before...

I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page.

Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly...

Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration?

By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!

[FedeEinhorn]

How are the pages in the tabs being loaded? iframes? Ajax? In both cases, they shouldn't be noindexed if they offer valuable content that can't be accessed from another page.

[rsigg]

The pages in the tabs are being loaded into the parent page directly via PHP, so they are rendered directly into the HTML of the parent.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There - glad you're enjoying the forums!

So if the tabbed "child" pages can not be crawled and indexed individually you have nothing to worry about. Are they indexed? Can you get cache for them by typing cache:www.yoursite.com/page-name ?

You can test crawling by using Screaming Frog. If the tabbed child pages do not show up when you crawl the site, you probably don't need to do anything.

If they ARE crawlable, then yes I would noindex them.

[FedeEinhorn]

Then you don't have nothing to do, nothing to noindex, as actually there are no extra pages. Is just one script that includes extra scripts "behind the scenes".

[rsigg]

I can indeed get cache for the child pages... (However, I'm using the free version of Screaming Frog, so I'm not seeing what I'm looking for there in the top 500 links)

The sitemap contains the only links (that I can see) to these child pages, so if I managed to change that, would that prevented them from being crawled? Or are search engine spiders going to "find" those pages because they were indexed previously, and I'll need to noindex them?

Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

OK so what I would do there is;

1. Add meta noindex tags to the child pages.

2. Wait for them to drop out of the index (check for them every week or so with site: searches or cache:)

3. When they get noindexed, then add rel = nofollow to the links within the HTML that points to those child pages so they stop getting crawled in the future. You can leave the noindex in place if you want.

[rsigg]

Sorry to take so long to respond; I wanted to wait until the child pages had dropped out of the index, in case I had any follow up Q's. Everything's looking good so far, and it seems all the links to any individual views of child pages have now been removed.

BTW, great post on WP and SEO, Dan!

Thanks again!