Should I use NoIndex on short-lived pages?

[PhilipHGray]

Hello,

I have a large number of product pages on my site that are relatively short-lived: probably in the region of a million+ pages that are created and then removed within a 24 hour period.

Previously these pages were being indexed by Google and did receive landings, but in recent times I've been applying a NoIndex tag to them.

I've been doing that as a way of managing our crawl budget but also because the 410 pages that we serve when one of these product pages is gone are quite weak and deliver a relatively poor user experience.

We're working to address the quality of those 410 pages but my question is should I be no-indexing these product pages in the first place?

Any thoughts or comments would be welcome.

Thanks.

[JohnSammon]

Hi Phillip! I would say yes to no-index as a short-term solution.

[PhilipHGray]

Thanks John.

By "short term" do you mean until we've improved the UX on the 410 pages?

Then remove the noindex after that?

[JohnSammon]

Hi Philip,

I do. If you can provide more details on your site,  I can give you additional advice on how to structure it. If it's an ecommerce site, sometimes what you may want to do is optimize the product category pages and no-index the indivdiual product pages (especially if they cycle out).

I hope that helps!

John

[PhilipHGray]

Yep - Product category pages are already quite strong.

Part of whats behind the question is that I've previously come into contact with a "bigger sites rank better" SEO philosophy.

So when I see that we've got over 1m+ pages in Search Console that are excluded on the basis of NoIndex tags it makes me wonder if I'm missing a trick!