Hello Donford,

The easiest thing to do if you are really only concerned about providing a link to more information for the distributor's visitors is to nofollow that link. This way you're not going to chance getting "dinged" for adding 10,000 links all at once.

If you have a few product pages on the manufacturing site that you'd like to improve you can selectively remove the nofollow tag from the link pointing to those pages from the distributor side, but I wouldn't recommend 10,000 followable links from a single domain all at once.

Questions like this are always difficult to answer because Google doesn't treat every site the same. A well-known brand with thousands of high quality links and a trusted, established site that has been in operation for a long time with good user metrics, and has never been penalized can get away with a LOT more than a relatively unknown brand or an "average" site. That is why I recommend starting with the nofollowed links and, if you want, testing the waters by allowing a few of them to be followed.

Please let me know if you feel your question has still not been adequately answered.

Cheers,

Everett

Hello SiliconBeachTraining,

"Is there a way to add meta descriptions to these pages?"

That all really depends on what content management system, if any, you are using and how much control you have over it. In theory, it is "possible" to do this with any site, and is highly recommended. In practice, however, you may be stuck with a 3rd party eCommerce vendor who can't or won't give you the fields needed in the back-end of their product to input that data. Even then, there are proxy services that act as a layer over top of your website that can give you greater flexibility.

Assuming you're on a public or open source CMS like Wordpress or Drupal, there are plenty of plugins that let you do this. Just Google "adding content to category and tag pages" or something like that and you'll probably find plenty of resources and tutorials.

Personally, I don't let my tag pages get indexed at all because they tend to be near duplicates of category pages, and of each other. I usually just apply a noindex,follow robots meta tag on those pages.

As for category pages you can cut down the number by making sure paginated pages all reference the main category page using rel prev and rel next tags and applying a noindex,follow robots meta tag on those pages as well (though NOT on the main category pages; just the paginated ones like /2 or ?p=2). I also like to make sure that the first paginated page (i.e./ category/?p=1 or /category/page/1/) always references the main category page (i.e. /category/) as the canonical version in the html header area.

Lastly, if you're going to write custom meta descriptions for each category, you might consider putting that same content as an intro to each category so they have more content than just a list of posts with snippets.

I hope this helps.

Everett @balibones