WebSite Cleanup Tips for a faster, better-indexed site
 by Stephen Mahaney

WebSite Cleanup Tips for a faster, better-indexed site

  • I'm Website Cleanup thinking of doing some pruning on a client's site to reduce the number of pages in Google's index. This subject has been covered before and it's believed to work (and I have seen some evidence to support this myself). But I'm wondering if I should stop Google looking at the /wp-content/uploads directory?

    Also, I'm thinking that some of the 'assets' have a very low impression rate and I'm under the impression, based on previous comments and trainings, that one way of getting Google to rank a site higher is to reduce the number of items there are to look at.

    However, if this isn't possible or is contrary to best practices, would it be better to just 'no index' any page with a low impression rate?

Answer:

Not sure why you'd want to keep Google out of the /uploads directory? Typically that's your media library and we usually DO want Google to be able to index images so they can render pages correctly and also send us traffic from Google Image Search.

That said, there's nothing wrong with cleaning out your media library of unused images to reduce the volume, BUT we wouldn't recommend blocking its indexing. That would likely cause rendering problems with Google.

Cleaning up a site is always a good idea. Reducing the amount of junk Google has to look at will typically improve a site's performance — most notably by getting a higher percentage of the site indexed. Duplicate content reduction and pruning away pages that are poor performers is a great way to help achieve that objective.

No-indexing non-important pages may help some but it does not prevent indexing – it only keeps the pages from showing up in the index and provides Google with an indication of their (lack of) importance. Bear in mind that Google may still may crawl them anyway.

We do recommend no-indexing pages you don't want listed in the SERPs such as your search results pages, WordPress tag pages, and sometimes author pages – things like that.

You should not no-index ...

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