5 replies to this topic

[Say Yebo]

Hi,

My client has thousands of 'print version' pages on his site, and now many of them are appearing in the SERPS instead of the proper web page.

Putting noindex on them all could be quite a task....and may not work anyway.

Is there a better way to resolve this? Can one list that many pages in the robots.txt file?

[Michael Martinez]

You might be able to contrive a wildcard option but that probably would not help much. This may only be a temporary situation that lasts a few weeks. Every now and then Google seems to dump a lot of pages from its index and then it recrawls the Web and rebuilds the index. I have seen many, many complaints in numerous forums over the past couple of weeks about sites' pages vanishing from Google. That is usually a clear signal of the temporary situation I describe.

I suppose if you cannot add "noindex" meta tags to all those pages, implementing a "rel='canonical'" tag would be just as cumbersome. But going forward you may want to work with your client on that.

In the meantime, one option some people have found helps is to acquire new trusted (high-value) links to their deeper content.

[Say Yebo]

Thank you Michael....that gives me some food for thought.

[Jill]

Can you put them all in one directory and exclude that via robots.txt? That's my typical recommendation.

[qwerty]

I've had bad results trying that a couple of times. Since the pages were already indexed, blocking them via robots.txt kept the spiders from attempting to check to see if they had changed, but didn't drop them from the index. I don't know if that's what happens most of the time, but that was my experience.

You might try setting up a separate CSS for the pages when the media is print. That way, you've only got one page for the content, but you still have the functionality of providing a print version that doesn't contain a bunch of unnecessary design elements. If you did that, you could delete the current print versions of the pages and redirect requests for those URLs to the other version.

[Say Yebo]

Can you put them all in one directory and exclude that via robots.txt? That's my typical recommendation.

Well, what I forgot to mention is that, strictly speaking, it's not just one site. It's hundreds of location based sites within one main site, and each sub-site contains similar content, all of which has print versions.

So a typical URL looks like this:

www.mainsite.com/HartfordKitchen/HowToBakeMuffins

So I'm assuming each subsite would have to have a directory with all its print pages in right?