Should I noindex user-created fundraising pages?

[Adam_Paris]

Hello Moz community!

I work for a nonprofit where users are able to create their own fundraising pages on the website for supporters to directly donate. Some of them are rarely used, others get updated frequently by the host. There are likely a ton of these on our site. Moz crawl says we have ~54K pages, and when I do a "site:[url]" search on Google, 90% of the first 100 results are fundraising pages.

These are not controlled by our staff members, but I'm wondering if meta noindexing these pages could have a big effect on our SEO rankings. Has anyone tried anything similar or know if this strategy could have legs for our site?

My only concern is whether users wouldn't be able to find their fundraising page in our Google CSE implemented on the website.

Any insight you fine folks could provide would be greatly appreciated!

[Nozzle]

Britney Muller, with Moz, did just that when she meta noindexed over 70,000 low quality profile pages created by users. As a result, Moz saw an increase in organic users, almost 9% the following month and then they saw a lift of 13.7% year-over-year for organic traffic the following month.

You can read all about it or watch the interview about it here: https://www.getcredo.com/britney-muller/

We think it's worth a try for sure.

[Adam_Paris]

Thanks! I've been wondering about it for awhile and actually stumbled upon this very article today - which prompted the question

[effectdigital]

Be VERY careful

Thing #1) Just because you stop Google indexing and crawling some pages, that doesn't mean they will give that same traffic (keywords linking to those pages) to other URLs on your site. They may decide that your other URLs, do not satisfy the specific keywords connecting with the fundraiser URLs

Thing#2) CHECK. Go onto Google Analytics and actually check what percentage of your Google traffic (and overall traffic, I guess) comes specifically through these URLs. If it's like 2-3%, no big deal. If most of your traffic comes to and lands on these pages, no-indexing them all could be the single largest mistake you'll ever make

Blog posts and articles are fun but no substitute for checking your own, real, actual, factual data. Always always do that

[Adam_Paris]

Appreciate the word of caution, I'm relatively new and am looking for well-rounded opinions about the repercussions such a massive move could make for our site. As a response:

Thing #1: We don't have many fundraising pages that rank highly for keywords, as we're still working on juicing up our regular site pages as is to improve in the SERP results. I was mainly wondering whether the glut of fundraising pages could be harming our SERP results. Some certainly have duplicate content but that's beyond our control, and I'm not sure if that could significantly be harming our results. Any thoughts on that?

Thing #2: Great call on checking the data. YTD nearly 1/3 of our user sessions have landed on one of these fundraising pages. I'm guessing that's likely either the hosts using google to find their page and then subsequently log in, or friends searching for it on google and then navigating and donating. We do still have a Google Custom Search Engine on our site. Presumably people could find them that way?

If you have any additional opinions or feedback given what I detailed above, I'd very much appreciate it!

[Nozzle]

Effectdigital is right in looking at your analytics and backlinks to help make this decision.

In the Moz case study we referenced earlier, they were getting rid of pages that didn't provide value at all to anyone. Those pages probably didn't have any links pointing to them at all. So it made sense to get rid of them.

Since your pages are providing value (it seems) and your getting 1/3 of your traffic coming into those pages, we would tread carefully on meta noindexing them.

You might only consider meta noindexing a group of them that haven't brought in any traffic this whole year and that don't have any links pointing to them. That way, you won't lose any existing traffic that your getting but you can see if the trimming helps your site's overall traffic and rankings.

[effectdigital]

I'd tread very carefully here as thing 1 and thing 2 seem to contradict each other at face value. You're right, Google can send traffic to a site in ways other than keywords, but it's not the norm. The next thing I'd look at is, hmm - how are we tracking keyword rankings? Is it an online, cloud based rank tracker that relies on you specifying all of (and all of the right) keywords to track? Most of those trackers track between 50 and 300 KWs (daily, weekly) but it's not uncommon for such sites to have 10,000+ keywords contributing. If they're not all in there, it's a bad sample you are looking at. Connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics. let it run for a few weeks, analyse the 'search query' data from within Google Analytics (which can be done once it's all hooked up). GSC only lets you export 1k keywords (usually, sometimes it can be more) but GA will take 5k and that's much better for your analysis. You might be surprised to find, those pages rank for more keywords than you thought. maybe hundreds of little ones, instead of a few big ones