Noindex the Tags page can increase traffic up by 300%
Feb 27
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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).
Mar 02 at 15:21
Well … duplicate content could be the problem ?
Mar 03 at 17:25
So you think that giving up indexing the tags made boosted your rankings? Or indexed more pages? I’m still unclear on this.
Mar 03 at 17:36
Well for me it boosted my ranking, like @Torrent said, it can remove duplicate content pages so you don’t get penalyzed by Google.
Mar 03 at 23:59
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.
Mar 05 at 23:28
i never heard this one. but since is so hard to be in the first seach results, it might work for duplicate ones …
Mar 12 at 09:58
300% ? big jump.
Mar 13 at 02:53
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?
Mar 13 at 13:12
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).
Mar 15 at 18:16
the only good thing that will happen after adding noindex is that the google duplicate penalty will dissapear.
Mar 18 at 13:06
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.
Mar 19 at 21:28
You can control noindex for tags, categories and archives with All in One Seo Pack plugin for WordPress too.
Good luck!
Mar 25 at 15:58
Duplicate content could be a problem for search engines…
Mar 26 at 10:44
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
Mar 29 at 22:03
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 ?
Apr 02 at 13:07
[...] 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 [...]
Apr 06 at 12:07
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Apr 29 at 21:21
[...] 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 [...]
May 16 at 18:04
This is interesting. I knew the tags indexed can get you more traffic, not the other way arround.
May 20 at 14:26
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.
May 20 at 14:58
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).
May 21 at 09:34
I didn’t knew this, thank you for sharing.
May 28 at 04:27
[...] 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 [...]