Affiliate site product pages - noindex, nofollow?

[curioustoddler]

We can write lots of content on main pages, product category pages but we do not have control over product pages which get content through xml feeds etc. Moreover they are availabe in the same form to lots of other affiliates also. We focus on product category pages and never intend to get traffic to individual product. So what should be the most appropriate thing to do. I have checked google mostly ignores these pages for most affiliate sites. So why not put these pages in noindex,nofollow ? Because that will also help when we decide to switch from present provider to another. Will it anyway be harmful to any site which puts thousands of its pages in noindex? And what if it has already few of them indexed in google and now we decide to put them in noindex? This is really important for me. Thanks a lot for your help.

[tedster]

The first question I come up with here is what would you hope that noindex,nofollow will achieve for your site? In order to read and follow that robots meta tag instruction, googlebot still needs to spider the page anyway. If they choose not to rank the page, then that is their decision.

[Whitey]

I second Tedster's question which leads me to another comment.

By building your own unique content you will give your site it's own value proposition. Google and users will love you if you do it well.

Lot's of affiliate product pages do not guarantee good returns - I've seen US$2bn companies relying on their websites built on relatively few product pages, compared to affiliate sites that mix and match data in huge quantity [ 300,000 products + ] to try and score an edge. The latter can work if you are really smart , but you are always at the mercy of someone else [ google and your data partner ]. Google is not enthusiastic about "thin affiliates" and you are more vulnerable in the SERP's with it.

So my comment relates to 1st , your strategy and lastly Google.

[tedster]

Here's a thread that may help clarify: Avoiding penalties against "thin affiliate" pages [webmasterworld.com]

Even though that is now a relatively old thread from 2006, it has aged quite well. If anything Google has gone even more strongly in the direction being discussed here.

[TheMadScientist]

Will it anyway be harmful to any site which puts thousands of its pages in noindex?

Let me answer directly: Nope... Not a bit in my experience.
I would not recommend using the nofollow though.

Personally, I would let them be spidered and followed, but let G know you don't intend for them to rank in anyway and they are only for your visitors reference as a convenience by adding noindex to them, but that's just me...

As always your mileage may vary, but I have run sites with thousands of noindex pages on them that do very well.

Personally, I wish there were more references we could use to communicate with search engines rather than making them guess... I would seriously use a robots reference which could include: "supplied-data" "visitor-reference-only" "user-added-info" and others if I could...

Maybe someday HTML 5 will be expanded to be even more communicative with bots, because it would be simple to use <usercontent></usercontent> on blog comments or forum posts and <supplieddata></supplieddata> to designate affiliate product info and other 'imported' information and even <visitorreferenceonly></visitorreferenceonly> to designate pages or portions of pages not intended to be used for ranking purposes rather than having to designate a whole page as something and only being able to say, 'include it' or 'don't include it' basically...

[curioustoddler]

Thanks a lot for being so helpful. Actually i am not in a position to add any content on product pages, but we have a done a lot of work on category pages which are in hundreds and these category pages are our main target pages which get most of traffic. So i assume that this site can not be considrered a thin affiliate site if we add hundreds of pages our own content to category pages. The only confusion is about thousands of product pages, which do not get direct traffic and we never intend to work for them.
As you said that we should just leave these pages as they are and let search engines decide. I am afraid that if we do that it may affect the ranking of hundreds of category pages because 80% of our pages will be duplicate content for search engines. If these pages do not affect the other 20% pages then we really do not have to worry about it.

[Robert Charlton]

Actually i am not in a position to add any content on product pages, but we have a done a lot of work on category pages which are in hundreds and these category pages are our main target pages which get most of traffic.

This presents an interesting structural dilemma. Normally, you want your product pages to get as much visitor exposure (and concurrently, link juice) as possible so they have a chance of ranking.

Where your category pages are your only targets, you have to channel as much link juice as possible to your category pages, and to make sure that whatever link juice is then sent to your product pages gets recirculated back to your category pages. So you definitely don't want to nofollow the product pages, and there's nothing gained from keeping them out of the index either.

Where you'll need to pay attention is in sending as much link juice as possible from those product pages back up to your category levels. Inevitably, some link juice will go to via the conversion link to the site the product is affiliated with. That's necessary to make the sale.

I'd strain hard to see if there's some way to add extra content and value to those product pages, though.

[TheMadScientist]

there's nothing gained from keeping them out of the index either.

The preceding has not been my experience.
I'll leave it there though...

Not trying to pick on you Robert, but the premise of 'let Google exclusively decide what to do with duplicate pages' seems to be flawed in my experience.

[curioustoddler]

Thanks a lot for your insight.
So we will try and see if we can add something to product pages.

[Whitey]

My tip is not to re-write meaningless content for the sake of having unique content. I've seen business' waste millions of $$'s in worthless static content with no corresponding benefit.

It needs to be done smartly.