Mask links with JS that point to noindex'ed paged

[derderko]

Hi,

in an effort to prepare our page for the Panda we dramatically reduced the number of pages that can be indexed (from 100k down to 4k). All the remaining pages are being equipped with unique and valuable content.

We still have the other pages around, since they represent searches with filter combination which we deem are less interesting to the majority of users (hence they are not indexed). So I am wondering if we should mask links to these non-indexed pages with JS, such that Link-Juice doesn't get lost to those. Currently the targeted pages are non-index via "noindex, follow"  - we might de-index them with robots.txt though, if the "site:" query doesn't show improvements.

Thanks,

Sebastian

[DanDeceuster]

First be aware that the "site:" query won't show improvements for a long time. I had a 15 page website I built for someone get indexed in the dev server on accident. I 301'd every page to the new site's real URL. If I site search the dev url's they are still there, in spite of the fact that they 301 and have been for nearly two months. One I did 6 months ago only recently was removed from the site search.

if you link to your own pages that are not indexed for whatever reason, you could try to mask them in javascript but just be aware of the fine line you walk. Google does not like anything that misleads them or users. Hiding a link that is visible to users and not them is not a good idea in my opinion. If you have content that isn't worth indexing, it shouldn't be worth linking to anyway.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Not to mention Google's ability to decipher JS to one degree or another, and they're working on improving that all the time.  I've seen content they found that was supposed to be hidden in JS.

[derderko]

Well, we just want to show less links to Google than to the user (but the links for Google are still a subset of the links shown to users). The links we'd do as JS links are those to less often applied search filters, which we don't index in order not to spam the search index.

Fortunately, if Google is smart enough in decrypting the links it wouldn't do any harm.

Thanks for our ideas tough! Especially the site: thing I considered myself, it really takes ages until something is de-indexed (for us, using robots.txt did speed it up by a magnitude).