No Index thousands of thin content pages?

[KenSchaefer]

Hello all!

I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc.  The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd."

These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders.  Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street".

Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd?   What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages?  Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them?

Thanks for any input.

Ken

[EGOL]

Just stating a couple of facts and a couple of things that I believe about those facts.....  I'll be clear to state the parts that are beliefs below.

1. If you have a lot of thin content pages on a website then you run the risk of Google seeing those thin content pages and slapping the domain with a Panda problem.  I believe that can cause reduced rankings across the entire domain.

2. Google recently said that they are going to stop following the links on noindex pages.  From that, I believe that some pagerank will be lost from every link that enters them.  I believe that can result in lower rankings for the entire domain.

If I owned the site above.  I would place all of these pages where they can be safely noindexed without causing a loss of pagerank and not produce a Panda problem.  That would require them to be in a subdomain that is noindexed or on another domain that is no indexed.

That's what I would do with these pages.

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Ken,

It depends a little on how the complaints are organised within the site structure, what links they have, and what traffic these pages bring in. Unless you think domain authority is a particularly big factor in the competitive space the site operates in, I wouldn't fixate on DA. Questions you do want to answer:

• Crawl the whole site, preferably using the Google Search Console and/or Google Analytics API with Screaming Frog. Do these complaints bring in (useful) traffic? Surely part of what makes the 311 service useful for community managers is that people in their community can easily comment and see the comments of others? Thinking further down the line, if the site is difficult for people in the community to find, will they use it less, and thus will community managers see less value in the service over time? Indirectly, people leaving complaints is probably a good thing for the service; do they usually do this after searching for "potholes on main street"? This is all guesswork on my part, as I haven't seen the site.
• If you do have a lot of traffic to the complaint pages, is it useful traffic? Could you afford to lose it (because that may happen if you noindex)? Remember to bear in mind the second-order effects: if nobody complains any more, the manager doesn't need a 311 service!
• Do you actually have valuable (external) links to the complaints? We can't guess at that—the only solution is to use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, Majestic, etc...

Without knowing more, I'll just say: there probably isn't value in having an indexed page for each complaint, but there might be value in having indexed collections of complaints, optimised for neighbourhood or street. So if there are 6 complaints about potholes on main street, a first step might be for each individual complaint-page to canonical back to the page detailing all complaints about main street. And if complaints are really that brief (1 or 2 sentences), eventually I'd prefer to change the site structure altogether, so that each complaint didn't get its own page at all, but that I had one page for each neighbourhood/street/etc, with the complaints listed there and preferably summarised in some way (i.e. "8 pothole complaints", "9 traffic light complaints, etc.) That kind of view might be useful if I was a resident of the place. You would still have to deal with pagination, especially if the number of complaints is large, but that's still going to be far fewer pages than if you have one for every complaint individually.

[EGOL]

I really like Stpehan's idea of "indexed collections of complaints".

[KenSchaefer]

Stephan,

There is little Organic Search traffic to these pages but there are a number of links pointing to them.  One of the benefits of this type of business is that you're associated with local governments so you do get links from .gov sites.  Most go to the service home pages but there are some that drive to the individual issue pages.

The grouping by category is something to think about.  I'll discuss with the team.

Thanks!

[KenSchaefer]

Egol,

Thanks for this.  I did consider the sub-domain option and I'm going to discuss this as an option with my team.

Ken