At the beginning of February I added meta noindex to the tags pages (keyword pages won’t be indexed in Google) to seo bugz.
After Google removed the tags pages from his index (site:seobugz.com), traffic from Google jumped by 300%.
Maybe because the inside PageRank doesn’t split to so many pages and other sites rank better.
Another method to make your tags/search pages not appear in Google is to use robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag
More about robots.txt and tag indexing read on capslock.ro (in romanian).
Comments
22 responses to “Noindex the Tags page can increase traffic up by 300%”
Well … duplicate content could be the problem ?
So you think that giving up indexing the tags made boosted your rankings? Or indexed more pages? I’m still unclear on this.
Well for me it boosted my ranking, like @Torrent said, it can remove duplicate content pages so you don’t get penalyzed by Google.
I’m not so sure, that was the cause. I think that indexed tag pages, help you get more traffic from less disputed niches. Maybe it helped, but it must have been someting else there.
i never heard this one. but since is so hard to be in the first seach results, it might work for duplicate ones …
300% ? big jump.
Wasn’t there any other action in sync with the one you mentioned that could have boosted your traffic like this? And what does it mean in absolute figures 300%, from 2 to 6 or from 2000 to 6000?
Changes I have made were done step by step, with 2 weeks interval. So probably the main cause was not indexing the tags pages. The traffic is high (not 2-6).
the only good thing that will happen after adding noindex is that the google duplicate penalty will dissapear.
I have made this kind of optimization one year ago for many sites but none of them got 300% increase. I am absolutely sure tha your trafic increased for other reasons.
You can control noindex for tags, categories and archives with All in One Seo Pack plugin for WordPress too.
Good luck!
Duplicate content could be a problem for search engines…
im afraid to use robot.txt bec google might stop crawling my site and might stop me from getting high pagerank. thanks for the info
Can you take a look at traffic sources ?Are you sure the traffic is from google and not from some sites that linked to your site ?
[…] tags, no-indexing these tag pages will surely help your posts rank better. Like in this guys case: traffic increase by 300% after no-indexing tag pages […]
Eu sunt curios care sutn cifrele abosulte de before and after. Pentru ca daca e vorab de cifra mici, atunci e credibil rezultatul. Daca e vorba de cifre mari atunci mi se pare… ciudat 🙂
[…] tags, no-indexing these tag pages will surely help your posts rank better. Like in this guys case: traffic increase by 300% after no-indexing tag pages […]
This is interesting. I knew the tags indexed can get you more traffic, not the other way arround.
i wont buy that! And I’ll te you why: because the noindex tag is just for telling the crawler NOT to INDEX a page. While a page has the noindex tag it will be out of index, but still passing juice and PR to other pages. I think you better try this one: nofollow. Nofollow helps by not letting juice to pass to tag pages. Noindex has nothing to do with that.
Your theory might is right @toto, there might be many variables there, but that is what I changed and that was the result.
My theory is that if you have for example 2 tags on same report: tag1 and tag2, and there aren’t any other reports with that tags, you will result in having 2 pages with identical content with just keyword changed and can get you penalized (auto generated pages targeting diffrent keywords(tags) with no diffrence in content).
I didn’t knew this, thank you for sharing.
[…] tags, no-indexing these tag pages will surely help your posts rank better. Like in this guys case: traffic increase by 300% after no-indexing tag pages […]