Ultimate noindex

Why not index your product pages ?

As I explain to my trainees in SEO training, the fundamental criterion for the success of the SEO of a website is the CONTENT! It is thus generally accepted that the editorial part of a page must be at least 300 words to be considered "good". This is a quantitative criterion, but Google can also analyze the content of the editorial, which must be relevant, unique, correctly written, etc ...

In the case of a PrestaShop site, it often happens that the product sheets are empty or almost empty: some pictures of the product, some features, and that's it! And that is the problem.

Among the criteria of the Google algorithms , there is a well-known which is called Google Panda. Its role is to judge the "quality" of a page, according to several criteria, including the richness of its content. And it is obvious that a page with very little content can hardly meet the needs of a user. Google will therefore negatively judge a page poor in content, and penalize by positioning it very far in the search results ("SERP"). It also happens that Google penalizes the entire site, not just the pages "poor in content".

There are only two solutions to prevent or break a Google penalty:

• create more content on your pages
• make sure your "poor" pages are no longer indexed

The first solution is obviously the most interesting one, but also the most time-consuming one. And if you have for example a catalog of 100 dresses, I challenge you to produce 100 original editorials, unreleased, different ... with more than 300 words!

The second solution (de-indexation of poor-content pages) can be applied preventively or curatively, and consists in asking Google not to take into account these pages in its index. It's better for Google to "know" fewer pages on your site, but only "good" pages, rather than indexing hundreds of nearly empty pages.

If you do not know if your site contains too many content-poor pages, order me a free SEO technical audit, which will allow you to know among other things the percentage of pages too poor of your site.

The interest of the Ultimate noindex module 

My module will allow you to automatically add the HTML tag "noindex" to not index (or deindex if it is already indexed) a product page of your PrestaShop site.

In the module configuration, you only have the minimum lengths to specify for four elements of your product sheet:

• the title tag (in number of characters)
• the meta description (in number of characters)
• the short description (in number of words)
• the description (in number of words)

By default, these lengths are at 0, that is to say that the minimum lengths will be validated, and therefore all your pages will remain indexed.

If you increase one of these parameters, for example the length of the description to 300 words, all product pages whose "description" field contains less than 300 words will contain the HTML tag asking the search engines not to index the page.

It suffices that only one of these criteria has an insufficient minimum length for the noindex tag to be inserted. So if you want to use only the length of the description for example, leave the other parameters to 0 and they will not be taken into account.

In the same way, you can deindex products below a certain quantity in stock. With a value of 1 for example, your out of stock products will be disabled.

You can also choose not to index (or deindex, curatively) certain types of pages that are not very useful or have a poor content: the sitemap, the contact page, the new products page, the promotions page, pages of search results, etc ...

Specifically, these pages with the tag "noindex" will be removed from the Google index as Google will crawl them. You will see the number of pages on your site on your Google Search Console decreasing over time. Since Google has fewer indexed pages for your site, it will be easier to return to your indexed pages more often.

How to be visible on Google if your product pages are not indexed?

If I go back to my previous example (a site selling 100 dresses), you will concentrate your editorial efforts in the dresses category pagecategories of dress (whose description is too often neglected), and you will create an internal mesh towards some models of dresses. Note that you can also produce a quality editorial on your best-selling dresses pages!