That’s right. Strike that page from the index. More often than not people get so wrapped in up getting ALL of their pages indexed by websites that they commit one of the most common SEO mistakes – having ALL of their web pages indexed. When aiming to be indexed the right approach is to have ALL OF THE IMPORTANT PAGES indexed. If you think that having all of your web pages indexed is the right approach then think again.
There are basically two kinds of web pages that you DON’T want to be indexed. First are pages that do not really have any real content to offer and have zero views. Examples of pages like this include “Email this page” forms, “Enlarged photo” pages, and stubs for topics and listings that do not really have anything under it. The other kind of page you don’t want to be indexed are pages that have duplicate content. For example if your site has “printer-friendly” pages (and printer friendly pages are good!) there is no need for the page showing the printer-friendly version to be indexed.
So what’s the harm if they are indexed?
The harm is that according to Google if they…
“perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.”
So now that you know. Make sure you block these pages from getting indexed. To do this all you need to do is specify these pages in your robots.txt file as disallowed pages. There you go. Now all you have left to worry about is how to get all the other pages indexed and how to optimize all the other pages.
Originally posted on September 23, 2007 @ 6:15 pm
