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Yep when/if Google shut down search operators there are a lot of processes that will be FUBAR! 100% agree a full ecommerce related Technical Audit is a must as a starting point. WQe recently saw a spider trap issue that was preventing a high percentage of  a clients product pages being crawled and indexed. Resolving was a major 'quick win'. Thanks for weighing in Everett. Appreciate it!

Hi Dana, Thanks for helping out! It's an ecommerce site. You mention that "content not on Page 1 is not being crawled or indexed by search engines". Wouldn't the pages still be crawled and the products that they list still be crawled and indexed? It's just that Page 2/3/4/5 etc wont be indexed because of the canonical? If this is the case the only negative effect I can see is that if the product combination on a page 2/3/4/5 happened to convey relevance for a particular search query then the page wouldn't be returned in the listings?

My apologies for taking so long to get to this question after you asked. Here are my thoughts. Have you seen this article that I wrote for Moz on Panda and thin content? https://moz.com/blog/have-we-been-wrong-about-panda-all-along I don't actually believe that Google demotes/penalizes eCommerce sites for having thin product pages. I think it's much more complicated than this. Most of the eCommerce sites that I have seen that were hit by Panda were, in my opinion, hit because their sites had very little to offer users to make them rise above the competition. If 10,000 different sites are all selling the same product, which site is Google going to show at the top of the search results? When Panda first came out, people were quick to jump on the "duplicate content" bandwagon. Lots of people were rewriting product descriptions because they felt that they would be penalized for using stock product descriptions. But this is not true. If an eCommerce site is demoted by Panda or by a Quality filter I think it's extremely unlikely for it to see improvement just because the product description is rewritten. Similarly, I don't think that noindexing product pages will make a big difference in the eyes of Panda. Now, if a site has a huge number of urls for each product (i.e. different sizes, colours, options, etc.), it's important to canonicalize those pages. In my opinion, this isn't for Panda reasons though but rather to help optimize your crawl budget and make it easier for Google to understand your site. You don't want Google to spend all of its time crawling 2000 variations of one product and not visiting the rest of your site. So, back to your original question. Should we be noindexing product pages with no or little product description? I don't think there is a black and white answer for this. I would likely start by looking at analytics data to see how user engagement is for these pages. If I'm looking for a particular product, it may not actually need a product description. If your site is one of the few that sells this product and the page itself is useful then it might be ok. Check your analytics...are people spending time on these pages? Are they immediately bouncing off? Are they making purchases after visiting these pages? Or are they mostly pages that nobody ever visits? If that's the case then perhaps they shouldn't be in Google's index. Another thing to look at is whether these product pages are frustrating to users. If you do have some indexed, you can look at data from Google Search Console Search Analytics. See what queries those pages are ranking for. Are those pages likely to answer the user's query? If not, if they are likely to frustrate users then they could be a Panda risk. For example, let's say you have a product page that is ranking relatively well for questions like, "How to choose a [product]", "what sizes does [product] come in?", "[product] user reviews". But, let's say that your particular page that is ranking for these terms doesn't answer any of those questions. It's my opinion that if your product pages are consistently not providing searchers with what they want, then they are at a risk for a Panda demotion and that demotion could be on your site as a whole. I think Google is getting much better at figuring out what sites are most helpful to users. In most cases, rather than deciding on what to index and what to noindex, I think the better spend of time and money would be on finding ways to improve the user experience overall so that your site is by far the better option than your competitors'. It's hard to do that objectively though. You may need to get nonpartial users to visit your site and your competitors' sites and tell you honestly which site they would prefer for research and for purchasing. I've likely skirted your question a little. I don't think the answer is black and white.

I see what you're getting at. This wasn't a "normal" redirect old page to new page situation. The page being redirected to existed all along, and then they decided to 301 pages to it that were not related topically or by page type. The page with redirects pointed at it dropped in ranking. I suspect the redirects through off the topical understand of what the commercial page was "about". It's a fascinating SEO test - but hopefully not something anyone would do for real. Rules of thumb: Try to get your URLs right from the very beginning Try not not change them unless you have to after the fact Definitely don't redirect from one page to another unless the content is an exact match (or really close) and don't redirect across page types (commercial to informational, vice versa etc)

I hear you loud and clear re. studying different query spaces. Do we know that in those query spaces where social shares correlate it is not actually down to links i.e can we remove the influence of links from the studies?

I hate to make it more complicated. But any website that scrapes content is surely looked down upon by Google. So, I would disavow links from those scraper websites as well just in case. As you wrote, something surely happened to you after that Penguin 2.0 update. So, I would disavow anything that could even remotely raise a red flag. (Note: You can write a note to Google explaining the situation directly in the disavow file -- as in, it was not your fault.) Still, I'm curious by the fact that you got hit despite the links being nofollow and/or having mainly brand-name anchor text. It might just be the sheer volume of links from release-distribution sites and scraper sites that caused it (if it was a LOT). Google's not always good at understanding context.

Yes. I completely agree. Think kind of text is crappy, pointless and I don't even think it'll do much to help your rankings (Google can sniff out "SEO optimised" copy from a mile-off). The approach I take for this kind of things is to get an actually decent writer to craft the copy, without considering keyword optimisation whatsoever and just trying to make it as useful as possible for the user. Assuming the writer doesn't use obscure language for the sake of it, this text will show enough relevancy for appropriate keywords and topics that the text will be better "optimised" than anything created for "SEO".

Hey thanks Irving, The distinction for me here is that over-optimised links / on-page is being penalised as you say 'on the fly' rather than seeing penalties corresponding to Penguin Updates like in the past. My question to people is ...do you think it's likely that separate Penguin Updates are a thing of the past (hasn't been one sine start of October) and 'Penguin like' ability has now been merged into the main ongoing algorithm?

I understand. having no alt tags is better than having the same alt tag with your main keyword on all images. I would probably reach out to them individually and request different alt tags for each site so that you vary the keyword phrases. This should not be a problem since you need to speak to each owner one at a time anyway. On images linked on a huge site that might be on hundreds or thousands of pages i would leave those blank. no need to ask them for your domain name added because you should be ranking for that anyway.

Keep in mind that DA and PA are scores that are developed by SEOmoz, not Google. Google does not come and look at OSE when deciding how to rank sites.

I guess as with most things SEO .... I'll test it. Thanks both for joining the discussion. I'll post results ... if indeed there are any.

These could be mostly internal links - are you linking to "/index.aspx" from your navigation, logo, etc.? In OSE, select "from [only external]", and you won't see your internal links. That can really skew the count.

Why are you doing a 301 redirect instead of just using a link that takes someone directly to the US/UK/AU versions of the site? You see lots of sites doing this at the top of their site with a flag corresponding to the country, etc. Anyway, is the text on the other sites unique or exact copies of the international? If so you could be causing more harm then good. Ideally you want actual top levle domains, like www.site.co.uk and www.site.com, etc.  Then the text on each TLD should still be somewhat different based on the keywords and differences in language those people use. You are correct though that your international version will rank better with the set up you have now, despite your folder set up.