Every Webpage is NOT Created Equal

In every website there are pages that are more authoritative than others. Although less authoritative pages are part of any website, if not managed properly they may be harmful to the overall SEO health of your website. Below are some tips on how to rank and prioritize the importance of your web pages.

1. Duplicate Content – 90 percent of the time, unhealthy pages contain duplicate content and thus are not only less authoritative, but extremely harmful to the SEO friendliness of your site. There are a variety of tools you can use to check for duplicate content, Google Website Optimizer being one.

2. Fancy Features can Kill SEO – Features are fun but are not always necessary. For instance features such as faceted navigation, tell a friend, and internal search can all tarnish your SEO efforts. A tip to manage these features: check if they can be indexed.

3. Lock it Down – Sometimes there are pages you must have on your site that just don’t need to be indexed on your site map. In order to exclude pages from being indexed, you can use JavaScript, Meta “robot” tags, or Robots.txt. You can also use meta instructions and add meta tag “robots” to pages which you don’t want to index. In order to do this, add the “noindex” instruction to the meta.

4. What Happens Next – If you choose to set exclusion rules in robots.txt, they will be followed strictly by all search engines. With the right rules, you can focus on your important pages and keep the index free of unimportant ones!

Questions, feel free to ask! We know things get heavy sometimes and we are here to help.