: Should category pages be noindex regarding panda? I have seen this question, but I believe the situation has changed a lot with the recent Panda updates. I have created a set of category pages
I have seen this question, but I believe the situation has changed a lot with the recent Panda updates.
I have created a set of category pages to facilitate navigation on my site. It is a proper hierarchy with no duplicates. However, these pages contain mostly navigation links.
Could these be considered thin content by Google? Or, is there a good reason I should mark them as noindex? Or should let Google index them?
Update:
After running some tests, I can confirm for sure that letting Google index my category pages triggered a silent penalty where all my indexed pages where not matched to user queries anymore. I had a high rate of those pages on my site.
First, I marked them a 'noindex,follow', but it had no impact, since these pages where still in the index. I decided to use the 'remove URL' feature of GWT aggressively to blast those pages away from the index. It worked. Within a day, Google was starting to match remaining pages with user queries again.
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The Panda update targeted thinn content.
Actually, if it is really an improvement to you visitors, it is a good thing because it is helpful.
But, must be rerlevant content on each of that inner pages - text+ images+videos+rersources+presentations/sliders + infographics +etc!
The user will appreciate and the Google too, because of the re-visiting higher rate - if there are periodicaly updated - and lower bounce rate.
I myself prefer to noindex, follow all my wordpress category, date, tag archives as all they do is duplicate content, however your page doesn't appears to duplicate any large portions of text, so I would't in this case.
I might add some content to the top of the page to explain what the page is about (if a user lands on it, its not that clear what its about), this will also help out in search engines as the page currently has no real content.
For my ecommerce clients, category pages are important. I suggest adding relevant content upto top 2-level category pages for them but in your website structure, the 'category page' is more like HTML SiteMap. For HTML SiteMap and similar pages, indexing and no-indexing is a matter of personal choice; just make sure if you go for indexing your OBLs are 'nofollow'
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