Hotel affiliate website - noindex pages with little unique content?

[CassisGroup]

We are well into development of a hotel affiliate website (using Expedia Affiliate Network), and I know there are many challenges to SEO when using an affiliate system - one of the biggest being how to handle duplicate content.

Outside of blog posts and static marketing pages, the majority of the textual content is contained in hotel descriptions. We will be creating unique descriptions over time, but we are a small team and this will be a lengthy process.

My question for you mozzers, is whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions?

Thanks for any input!

[EGOL]

whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions?

This is what I would do.

In the past you could allow those pages open for indexing and google would simply ignore them.  Now you run the risk of hitting a Panada filter that will reduce the rankings for the rest of your site.

Good luck in this niche.  Really really difficult.  You need either enormous site strength or lots of unique substantive content (which you are doing).

[matbennett]

That is exactly how I would handle it.  If you get penalised from having large amounts of duplicate content it can be a slow process to get gbot to crawl the whole site again and lift that penalty - particularly if it is large site.

I'd also be looking at other ways to bring unique content in to those pages beyond just descriptions.