Onsite calendar throwing out thousands of pages

[McTaggart]

Hi guys - I have just stumbled across an onsite calendar that's throwing out hundreds of indexable pages (some are indexing) - most of the pages are basically blank - just a day date and the calendar design on the page. How would you deal with this issue? I was thinking noindex but would prefer a solution where calendar isn't throwing out so many pages to begin with!

Look forward to reading your thoughts, Luke

[MattRoney]

Hi Luke! It might help if you can let us know how the calendar is set up. Is it embedded from a third-party? Is it some sort of plugin? And what CMS are you using:

The more information you can provide about the calendar and your site, the better. Bonus points if you can provide some URLs.

[McTaggart]

Hi Matt - yes, trying not to upset the web dev by posting link (though can do privately if needed)! The CMS is Drupal and is hand-coded in, it seems (and there lies the problem) - every day, month, week you can think of is creating a unique URL, which isn't very helpful - most of the days, months, weeks into the future are blank - you just get a box on the page with, say, March 2017 - and nothing else. I was thinking noindex may be a quick solution (best solution would be to remove the calendar) - though not sure whether that will protect me from all issues - do I really want crawlers heading through hundreds/thousands of empty pages - perhaps I should noindex, nofollow?

[MattRoney]

Personally, I'd think noindex/nofollow would be a decent solution, provided you don't mind those pages never ranking. You could also block the calendar in robots.txt.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Luke

Matt has the right idea. If the pages are going to "exist", you should block search engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.

I would get your dev to help, but basically you'd find the folder or path in which you want to crawler to stop at. Maybe it's /month/ or something and you'd block that in robots.txt.

Ian covers this in his recent article about "Spider Traps". And you can also read about robots.txt on Moz or on Google.