Automated: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another edition of Marketing School, I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today we're going to talk about what pages on your site you should consider note indexing. So first and foremost Neil maybe we should describe what no indexing is. What is no indexing?

Neil Patel: Note indexing is putting this code within your HTML, and it just tells Google do not index this page. Or you can use a robot.txt file and tell Google don't index the following pages or sub-directories, or sub-domains.

Eric Siu: So you know from a blog perspective when I think about what I always no index, it's almost always the tag pages, right? 'Cause I don't want a bunch of tag pages showing up, 'cause I might have hundreds or thousands of tags and that creates just a bunch of like stuff. It's a bunch of bloat that really isn't that valuable to search engines, and we did talk about crawl budgets in the past. So if you have a really big site and you have just a ton of tag pages probably not that helpful, maybe you should consider no indexing them.

Neil Patel: Yeah, with no indexing the biggest thing is it controls your crawl budget, so Googles only going to crawl so many pages of your site, and that some. If you have too many pages that they're wasting their time on, they don't feel these pages are high quality, they're not going to keep crawling your website. A lot less of your pages will be indexing and you'll get a lot less search traffic. For that reason you want to take all your low quality or thin content pages, no index them, you want to take all your duplicate content pages and again no index them.
The other thing I like doing is I take all my pages that aren't getting much search traffic, so even if I think they're high quality, I go into Google Analytics. I'll look at all the pages that have less than 100 visitors from search, within the whole year, and assuming that they're over six months old, right? Or a year old, whatever criteria, technically you'd have to a year old. By looking at those pages if they're getting less than 100 it means that Google doesn't care for them, so you may want to consider no indexing as well, assuming those pages also don't have too many back links pointing to them.

Eric Siu: Which I just talked about tag pages, but also what else you might want to consider no indexing, especially if you're E-commerce, maybe the search result pages 'cause they aren't that useful sometimes. But some search pages do actually end up ranking so I think you have to look at your analytics first and determine what you want to cut and go from there. But generally A I talked about the tagged pages, B the search result pages. I think debatable right now, some people are like oh you should probably no index your category pages. I don't think I agree with that because the category pages are useful. For example if I'm looking for a shoe's category on Zappos for example. If I'm looking for basketball shoes, it probably would be helpful for me to be able to find that page, if I Google. From there I can decide what kind of basketball shoes I want to buy.

Neil Patel: Yeah, that's pretty much it on my end, if you just do those things as Eric and I have mentioned you should do better.

Eric Siu: Great, and then finally I think I'll add one more, you probably want to no index your paginated results. So you know you have the page two plus, that has multiple pages in there, that might be a good candidate for no indexing as well. But before we go, we do have another special giveaway, this is a one year annual subscription of Drip, which is personally my favorite E-mail automation tool at the moment. Basically it allows you to tag, lead score, split test and it also has revenue reporting, plus a whole host of other features. If you want to win a free year of Drip all you have to do is rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. Then text the word marketingschool, that's one word, marketingschool to 33444 to prove that you did it. If you're international just go ahead and E-mail me with a screenshot to [email protected] to prove that you did in fact leave a review, and we'll go from there. So that's it for today, we'll see you tomorrow.

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