Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Michael Martinez: I would not. Other people would. I don`t see the benefit of using noindex on pages like that. ON EDIT: With any choice you make about what to allow crawlers to index, etc., you should ask yourself 1) What problem do you need to solve; 2) How does this idea contribute to the solution; 3) What is the cost of implementing this idea? The answers will never be the same for every site, every situation.
JL Faverio: it`s a huge site, and if I noindex less valuable pages such as these, wouldn`t that benefit their crawl budget?
Michael Martinez: JL Faverio NOPE. "Crawl budget" is not something you and I manage. It`s something determined by the search engine based on how well your server responds to their fetch requests. If your server is THAT unresponsive, you have bigger problems. Just do a little bit of quick math and see how many pages from your site a search engine could fetch in 30 days assuming it requests 1 page every 2 seconds.
Paul Thompson: No. Noindex pages still get crawled. The crawl rate will go down the longer they`ve been no-indexed, but still crawled.
Richard Hearne: JL Faverio You might get better value by increasing the number of posts on each paginated page, thus reducing the overall depth. This can also be applied conditionally so that it doesn`t impact your UX.
JL Faverio: Richard Hearne great reminder thank you.
Paul Thompson: Those pages should have rel-next and rel-previous metatags, in which case they shouldn`t be no-indexed.
Chris Boggs: and canonical to the /blog/pages/ if needed but /blog/ should be better...does the /pages/directory only show up after the first page of the blog? (making "Page 1" example.com/blog/ and page 2 example.com/blog/page/2?)
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: I`m in this belief stated above. If you noindex them, you`re effectively making it harder for Google to find the pages once they leave the blog home page or category pages.And if you put rel pagination on them, you`re giving conflicting signals if you add noindex too
Becky Westmoreland: I`d also advocate for eliminating pagination on a blog post. But I`m also one of those users that hates HATES pagination.
Richard Hearne: Chris Boggs Why would you want to mix rel=next/prev with canonicalisation to the head page of each index? Better one or the other (and I now prefer the former), but not both IMO.
Chris Boggs: Richard Hearne it is fine with Google :) https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
Richard Hearne: Chris Boggs where on that page does it say it`s fine to mix rel-next/prev with canonicalisation to another page? It doesn`t.
Chris Boggs: perhaps next time just ask the question rather than stating it doesn`t ;)
Richard Hearne: It says you can combine canonical with rel=next/prev. It does not say you should canonicalise to the head page while combining with rel=next/prev. I`ll stick by my advice which is not to send conflicting signals like this - it may work out fine, but I wouldn`t rely on it.
Eric Wu: While I don’t disagree with what’s said and that real=next/prev should suffice.If it’s a large site and the blog has no material value to the business then I say it doesn’t matter if you noindex or not. So if you want to test if it has an impact on your crawl by noindexing those URL types, you should try and observe. It might provide you insight on other aspects of your site or might just inform you that if you see this scenario again that you don’t have to spend mindshare on it. Just leave it be.
Arsen Rabinovich: I agree with Eric! Each site is unique, there`s no one correct way that works across the board. If you are organizing content into topic category silos, and allow the paginated category archive to be crawled, you can noindex/nofollow the /blog/ archive. However, in a different setup, like a service provider, where the blog is basically a "company blog", and categorical organization of content is not needed, you would allow Google to crawl through that paginated blog archive.
You`d noindex the following type of pages right? "
