Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The problem is I have many subdivisions of products and all are very similar. For example:
widget1
widget1, Model 1
widget1, Model 1, Colour 1
widget1, Model 1, Colour 2
widget1, Model 1, Colour 3
widget1, Model 2
widget1, Model 2, Colour 1
widget1, Model 2, Colour 2
widget1, Model 2, Colour 3
widget1, Model 3
...
There is enough duplication in that to cause the pages to be filtered as duplicates in Google, yet they are good landing pages. Not only that, it is more likely to filter the top level widget pages rather than the more obscure widget/model/color page.
We simplified the website to suit Google, last year and again in February but it only helped a little and we lost most of the best converting traffic. Instead of people searching for "widget1 color2 model 132a season" and being taken directly to a page with exactly what they were searching for, they ending up on generic pages and no longer converted.
I have an idea, could I optomize for Google and other search engines by putting
<META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="follow, noindex">
on all of the subcategory pages. So that Google can only index the top level widget pages, and all lower level pages have instructions for Google to simply pass through without indexing them?
So I want to build my site for MSN with closely targetted pages, and then give Google just the main product pages so that Google doesn't penalize my pages as duplicates, but I can still get the excellent conversion rates I got from my close targetted pages on MSN?
Will this work?
Also if I put adsense on pages flagged
<META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="follow, noindex">
does that also block adsense? Do I have to change/remove the adverts to that page?
and how would that affect PR?
At this point, it makes little difference if it doesn't work for Google, since I'm going to go ahead and focus on an MSN friendly site, but I would like to find a way that works for Google too, even if they only want to index a few pages from my site.
