Should I "nofollow" for add-on products?

[ffctas]

Is there any SEO benefit for "do not follow" on a large number of sku's on my site.
These products are add on's for sales of my main product category. There are thousands of them and they are sold by scores of other companies like amazon, sears, etc. I will rarely rank in the top 40 searches for any of these products. Most people find them on my site while buying my main product.

So, is any of my PR/"link juice" being marginalized by having these items indexed by google?

Thanks for your help

[goodroi]

I worry less about PageRank and more about relevancy and user satisfaction. I rarely spend much time trying to manipulate PageRank.

If you have robust product pages that are useful to the users and are interlinked in a relevant way, I would lean towards using clean "do follow" links.

If you have very few backlinks and a massive website, then you might want to conserve how the link juice is flowing throughout the website. I would look at it from another perspective. If I had a massive website and very few backlinks I would work to develop more backlinks till it was appropriate to the website.

In other words I personally don't like using "no follow" because it might not be addressing the core issue like having a weak backlinks for your website.

[aakk9999]

In OP situation I would use noindex on these product pages (but do not "nofollow" the pages).

[netmeg]

It depends on the ratio of add-ons to real products, but if I had to keep balance, I'd probably come down on the side of what aakk9999 suggests.

[Robert Charlton]

ffctas - As others have suggested here, whatever else you do, avoid "nofollow" links to internal pages. "Nofollow" links create PageRank "black holes", so internal PageRank is actually lost by using them. Better to use the robots meta tag, as aakk9999 suggests, with the index,follow attributes. This meta is "follow" by default, but I mention it just in case you don't know that.

I have a question for you though, which is: how are the SKU's being used on the site... and what do you mean by "add-on products"? For those who don't know, SKU stands for "stock keeping unit", and any variation in dimension or color (etc) of a product will result in a different SKU number for it.

I assume that each link is essentially a link to a page displaying a very slightly different variant of the product, or perhaps a different type of packaging. Is that the case? If it is, you will also have potential dupe content issues among different SKUs of essentially the same product.

Do different SKUs in fact need entirely separate pages? I'm thinking that... on ecommerce sites... different kinds of products and product variants probably have different display needs and different approaches to the SKU problem.

On some types of product, it's possible to have an interface that selects differences in dimension, eg, say by check boxes or drop down lists, and the choices would feed into your ordering back end.

On other product variants, though, you may want to show different images of the product for different SKUs, but they are likely to have essentially duplicate text content, which you wouldn't want Google to see. There may be a javascript-Ajax approach that would work. Mobile sites create their own problems.

One of the issues with SKU's is that while they're not often searched, they might be searched by quantity purchasers... particularly on B2B sites, and they definitely are important to some vendors and customers.

The trick is to make these accessible without duplicating the pages. Perhaps finding SKUs can be done via site search, if you have a clear enough interface... and or via a list in your main product page.

I'd love to hear of some creative solutions myself.

[ffctas]

By add-on I mean a product a customer finds as an accessory to the main product for which they are searching. For example, I might carry unique wood products that only I carry. A customer might need nuts, bolts, nails etc. to complete a project. These nuts, bolts, etc are commodity products that are carried widely on the internet. In fact we have a third party supply the nuts and bolts and we just pick up a feed from them with these accessory products. Many websites including amazon, sears,and other big sites are provided this feed. While my site is indexed for these products their exposure is very weak as I am competing with the world's largest sites.

My customers find these products on my site while buying my main product, not from search engines. So the question is does it make sense to have these products displayed on search engines at all?