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I have many pages Category Pages that show items inside, but all items has expire time and after reach it, items will remove from page. Sometimes happen, some categories/pages will be empty and this is not good for SEO thing I think, and after sometimes google detect these pages as duplicate content, I'm thinking about to set noindex, nofollow meta tag for these pages if are empty, then bring back index, follow meta tag if has any items.

  1. Does google back to revisit a noindex page, that realized it was noinxdex before?
  2. Is it legal method? Does not google wonder why I toggle index noindex a page multiple times?
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    I think it's better to have good content on these pages than it is to keep setting all of your products to NOINDEX. But I think that Google will recrawl these NOINDEX pages when they have content again and that they should get reindexed.
    – Michael d
    Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 14:08
  • @Michaeld Good idea but there are many pages in this situation, more than thousand pages, so it's hard to provide content for each page, some categories are hard to write any content for them.
    – Pedram
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 4:50
  • You can also set these pages to 302 moved temporarily if you think you will add the products back at a later time. Structuring your site to be largely temporary while trying to have it indexed does pose an interesting SEO problem in general though.
    – Michael d
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 5:05

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I don't know your exact situation, but I have few solution.

  1. If your category pages does not bring any traffic then better to use noindex for a lifetime, but don't worry Google still crawl and pass pagerank on noindex pages as well. It just does not show up in Google search result.

  2. If category pages are more important to you and bring better traffic and leads, then probably you should add textual content on it, so even if your product is expired, it will generate traffic and you can display your other products on it. I will also not remove the expired product as well, I will just show it, it is expired.

  3. If your category pages is not much important for you, then simply don't include your category pages in your sitemap, so it will less crawl by Googlebot and in meantime you can come back with new products in same category page. Or keep doing what you're doing, I don't see any harm.

Regarding your question.

Does google back to revisit a noindex page, that realized it was noinxdex before?

Yes Googlebot will come back and crawl your category page via sitemap or from your any webpage link and it will index it again.

Is it legal method? Does not google wonder why I toggle index noindex a page multiple times?

There is no any official penalty about adding and removing noindex tags for multiple time, as far I know when Google index the page for the first time, then it assign inception date, and when you remove it, it might get delete automatically. And when your category pages index again then it will assign new inception date.

And in last, If it's all about law/duplicate content then there is no need to use nofollow tag.

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A far better way of doing this will be to have static content on these category pages that will help them rank regardless of whether there are items on them or not. To keep using noindex.nofollow tags like that is likely to break something else.

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