Printer friendly pages (2 per product)

Almost identical...

[Chico_Loco]

I've recently written my own shopping cart for my website. It's custom application which generated .htm files for an output, instead of being dynamic.

I've made it such that each product in the catalog has 2 printer friendly pages. Here's why it's 2:

One of the printer friendly pages is just text, no images.. on this printer friendly page there's a link to display the image, which brings you to another page, which is identical, except that an image is display. So for each product in the catalog there is essentiall 3 pages. I've strictly done this from a user friendly point of view. SEO more or less went out the window during the writing of this program.

So for each product (for example) there would be a 170.htm (the product with full formatting), 170.print.htm (printer friendly without image) & 170.print.img.htm (the printer friendly page with image displayed).

With about 200 products in the catalog (and it will grow), this means about 600 crawlable pages. Will this cause an issue with search engines, but particularly Google?

[ThomasB]

I would disallow all robots/Googlebot to spider the 2 printable versions to prevent you from getting into a duplicate content trap. If robots.txt is not possible use metatags noindex instead.

Thomas

[Chico_Loco]

Thanks for the advice!

It would need to be NOINDEX given that these printer pages are in the same folder as the main product pages themselves.

I don't suppose the infamous GoogleGuy would have any input on this one?

[patoruzu]

I always have used the metatag noindex in my printer friendly pages and everything is OK with Google