No-Indexing on Ecommerce site

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products .

Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure.

I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas?

It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated

[mostcg]

Do you have traffic data for any of these pages? If they're landing pages and garner clicks then obviously you'll want to keep them indexed.

The revenue you're receiving from these pages could be due to users navigating to them from brand pages, product categories, menus, or it could be cross-selling, etc.

I would say consolidate as many as you can for UX purposes so a customer doesn't have to click off of the page for another color or size.

[BeckyKey]

Hi,

Yes it's more than 20%.

The products are a combination of products we've had to take from sister companies, the content isn't duplicate, but I wouldn't say it's high quality or optimised.

The other kind is products with duplicate into on our own site, some of these ideally need to be merged onto one product page - but this is a big dev project I don't have much control of at the moment.

When disallowing by Robots.txt, the only issue I have is I would have to manually add URLs, as we don't have sub-categories in our URLs.

Thank you for your suggestions - these are really helpful. Is there a preferred option for SEO?

Even with moving products down on the product listings - these will still be crawled so does this help tidy the technical structure in anyway?

Thank you

[Jan_Januska]

Hi Becky,

I have a few questions:

• How many is a lot? More than 20%?
• What does "lower quality products" mean? Do you have products with duplicated content which can be found also in another ecommerce sites? Or do you have (near) duplicates within your website?
• And, how many visitors did come to that product pages from the search engines? Can you exclude them without big consequences?

Probably, using of the noindex won't have positive impact on the rankings for more important pages. The noindexed pages will be still crawled and they will get a link juice.

Disallow by robots.txt could be better solution. But it seems to be very complicated.

Try to consider these solutions:

• Solution 1: Move lower quality product to the end of the product listing. Important products should be in the beginning.
• Solution 2: Exclude products from the product listing. You can keep it in database, findable by internal search.
• Solutions 3: Merge similar products, use only one URL. If products have another feature like color, user would choose it by select box.
• Solutions 4: Choose one main product and similar products can be used as "sub products" (check image with the example below)

Jan.

tDfdC