Do internal links from non-indexed pages matter?

[Blink-SEO]

Hi everybody! Here's my question.

After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages.

Would be great to hear your thoughts!

Sam

[Alick300]

Hi,

I can't say about any research has been done on this topic or not. First I would like to quote whatt moz says about internal linking  "Internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link juice (URLs are also essential)."

I would like to break into two parts

1> If page/pages linked from blocked pages it means crawler won't find linked pages because pages are blocked from robots.txt this hinders their ability to get pages listed in the search engines' indices. I presume these pages blocked in robots.txt before migration so this could not be reason

2> Link Juice won't flow because it is blocked & it is blocked earlier too (before migration) so this also could not be the reason.

*** During migration website does lose ranking if website does not properly redirected so please check whether you followed best practice for migration or not by checking below URL

http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Thanks

[Keszi]

Hi Sam,

If the pages that you are talking have been blocked by robots.txt I do not think they would be in any way beneficial. In our case (because of a development made back in 2009 - which still wasn't corrected) we have pages that are noindex, follow. And I have seen that some anchor texts used for internal linking still bring value to the landing pages.

I hope this helped, Keszi

[Dr-Pete]

Blocked pages are generally not going to pass internal link equity, but the impact of this depends a lot on your site structure. If these were deep pages at the end of paths and your site nav covers major/ranking pages, it shouldn't matter too much. If these pages were in the middle of paths, you could be causing serious problems.

There's also the question of whether these pages themselves (the blocked ones) were getting inbound links or were themselves ranking for some of these terms.

Unfortunately, at this scope, it's really hard to speak in generalities. Can you give us a sense of what these pages are and why they were blocked? How large is the site overall?

[Blink-SEO]

Hi Pete! Sorry about the delay.

The site is https://www.holidayhypermarket.co.uk/, and the non-indexed pages are products such as:

https://www.holidayhypermarket.co.uk/destinations/greece/zante/laganas/36695/tzante-hotel?searchId=6079233&holidayId=2525188

These are noindexed as they tend to have syndicated content.

Thanks!

[Dr-Pete]

I assume these are pretty deep in the site structure, so I don't think those "links" being reported are very powerful or important. Some people claim that, since PageRank is recursive, you don't want to cut off paths, but when the paths are deep I've rarely seen any evidence to support this. A big, bloated index full of thin content, especially content available on other sites, is a much bigger danger.

I would not recommend using both a NOINDEX and a rel=canonical on these pages. It's a mixed signal, and that can cause Google to ignore one or both signals (and at their choosing, not yours). I think NOINDEX is fine here. I've built structures like this for things like event websites (where we index the main event but NOINDEX all of the cities/dates, because they change so often) and have never seen any major issues. Actually, in one notable case, even before Panda came along, the site's rankings improved measurably.