Stub category pages (dupe warning)

[benseb]

Hi

I have a number of highly ranked category pages. However, at times these contain no products for a few weeks, etc.

They are being flagged as duplicate content as they are just stub pages when they have no products, with the same "No products found" message.

I don't want to risk 'noindex' ing the pages though - because as soon as they have products in, they become valuable pages and I would hate to lose a good ranking.

Should I just leave them as-is and ignore the dupe warnings?

[matbennett]

I think that there is a slightly bigger question here. Rather than "How can I stop Moz flagging these up as duplicate?" you might want to ask "Are these duplicate pages harming me".

Thin pages, particularly those ranking on desirable terms, are something I try hard to avoid.  They send pretty poor quality signals to Google and create poor user experience signals as well.  If there is a term that I want to rank for I would ensure that pages are strong enough to deserve ranking before letting them get indexed.

It can be painful to deindex a page that ranks. However if those pages are giving off bad signals that could be your best chance of long term ranking success.

A compromise might be to fill them out in the mean time.  How effective this might be will really depend on your niche and your website.  Lots of stores do this by just adding a load of low value text to the page, but a better approach is to try to put something useful there until the products arrive.  Do this right and you could even be building links into those pages before the products arrive.

One example of this that I have done in the past is to build out a great coming soon page that featured a competition to win the item when it launched,  As well as ensuring that there was a page worthy of ranking (particularly against the competition who were using stub pages!), it brought some other key advantages:

• The competition was used to build links from related sites
• User experience was great. People hung about, watched the video and filled in the entry form
• It got shared (bonus prize draw entries for sharing!)
• When the product hit the shelves we already had a mailing list of interested customers

That's fairly involved, so won't work for everything, but the principals are sound.  If you were Google which would you want to rank? That or an empty page?