Hello Guys, I'm webmaster of local law website (Personal Injury) in US. Before sept 2016 (possum update) we have great ranking (local), but starting that time we start dropping for most of our important Keywords. Few weeks ago i hirex one of the famous SEO gurus in US (most of you know that guy, but i'm not going to promote - so no name ) and one of his suggestions was "Are you a blog or are you a local law site. Rankbrain has to decide which one is which. Right now is chooses blog." His suggestion is to NOINDEX all blogs (right now are noindexed category pages, tags - all pages that can duplicate original pages) Our website is eng/spanish website, 1.3k listed pages in google (600-800 pages are blog posts - "news", "tips", "what to do" ). All of them have original and uniq content - so it's hard decision to noindex huge part of the website. What do you think ! Any advice will be appreciated ! P.s. here is the picture of indexed pages for other websites with competitive keywords in google 1st site - yelp 2nd - 38 indexed pages 3rd - 1.6K 4th 330 5th 1.3k 6th findlaw (directory law website - with a lot of pages) 7th 6k 8th 193 9th 31 10 660 1. yelp 2. 38 3. 193 4. 1.3k 4. 330 5. 1.5k 6. findlaw 7. 5.9k 9. 31 10. 663
Heck no. What's the point in having a blog if you're going to noindex it? Google favors larger more authoritative websites.
I am sure he knows what's he is saying. But the problem is he has not explained it to his client clearly. I guess he is talking about internal keyword cannibalisation.
Ok, I'll explain here what he mean and what's the purpose of this action. To be short it's Rankbrain. His vision is that RankBrain have scores for each website and each website has ranked in different categories. So as he mentioned - our website right now confusing rankbrain -> are you a blog or a law site? you can't be both. I agree that it's wired to noindex part of the website, but in another way real reason why we have blog on our site is to get potential clients for our "practice area" section. ON another side with our main keywords on first SERP page there are only 2-3 directory websites (yelp, findlaw) and Law Firm websites (there aren't any educational, blog or FAQ websites). SO the idea that RankBrain have his own category for each website IMHO is right. What i don't know is it right decision to noindex blog section to not confuse RANKBrain. P.s. As i told before our website had good rankings before Possum update, and we lost some of our positions after that.