No index, or no index no follow?
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Wondering if I could garner some views on this issue please.
I'm about to add an affiliate store to a website I own, the site has a couple of pages of unique content (blogs, articles, advice etc on home improvement - all written by my team). Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store.
Should I add a no index to the pages and allow the bots to still crawl them, or should I add no index and no follow? Ideally I would like to get the affiliate store category pages indexed as they will be a mixture of lots of different merchants and be fairly unique.
Can Google still mark the site down for duplicate content if it can crawl it, even if it is noindex?
Thanks,
Carl
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Carl, I have a few ideas and suggestions. I will respond to your original mentions:
"Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store."
I find this interesting that you automatically assume that you have to use the original datafeeds from CJ. I would encourage you to contact Commission Junction directly on this matter. Many services allow you to provide an alternative product description, etc.The faq section of feedwizards has an example which you can read about here: https://dashboard.feedwizards.com/faq/9 (look for: How do I avoid duplicate content on shopping engines & affiliates using my feeds)
Matt Cutts as also spoken on this topic as well in the video I included. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw
Hope this helps
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Hi Carl,
Don't put a nofollow tag on the pages since this will cause a loss of pagerank. The pagerank will flow into the pages and won't flow out to your "doindex" pages when a nofollow tag is used.I do recommend to use a noindex to avoid duplicate content. However you won't get a penalty when you index the pages (if not to spammy). Google might ignore your "duplicate content" pages but you also could gain some traffic.
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