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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 Jannkuzel,

That is correct.

Some 3rd party review sites get around this by placing the content on your site in an iFrame. What this would essentially mean is that they get credit for the content and you don't. So while that may be a good experience for your users, having the content on your page in an iFrame would not help your SEO directly.

If the content is NOT in an iFrame and is crawlable on the page (just search for a snippet of the comments/reviews in your source code) then you would have a duplicate content problem with that same content showing up on the 3rd party's website.

An ideal situation would be for you to be the only site that shows the reviews and comments since they are about your products, after all.

Good luck!

Everett

Hello Jannkuzel,

Your developers certainly will know what a JSON or XML feed is, and how to implement it. The real question is: should you implement it?

Does the 3rd party publish the review on their site as well? If so, are they crawlable by search engines? Does the feed they give you link back to their site?

Ideally a review solution that you place on your eCommerce site would have reviews that ONLY appear on your site and does not include any links back to the service provider's website. After all, you're paying them so why should they also get free advertising, traffic and page-rank from you? However, an ideal solution and an affordable one often do not overlap.

I may have just complicated things more for you, but to answer your question:
Yes, the ideal solution described above would have SEO benefits for you. However, if the 3rd party site publishes the same content (e.g. your reviews) on their website it could create problems for you too.

Regards,

Everett

Hello Vlevit,

You could do several things. I recommend giving Google your product feed, which should accomplish your goals. Another possible solution would be to make those search pages noindex,follow so they don't end up getting indexed, but Google can still use them for discovery.

Thanks for explaining the situation.

Below is more on submitting product feeds. It is for Google Product Search, but I would imagine the "link" field where you put the URL to your product detail page will help those pages get indexed in the standard results:
http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#US

Everett

Hello Vlevit,

If you can be more specific we may be able to be of more help. Google doesn't want you to show internal search result pages, but if this is a different type of situation it there may be an exception. Are these search result pages, product pages, category pages, content pages.... is it an eCommerce site, community, content site... ?

Generally speaking, 1M+ pages with no links going into them and content that is either sparce/thin or partially/fully duplicated on other similar pages (like a search for widgets and a search for green widgets showing overlapping content) is exactly the type of thing that will get you in hot water that would affect even the rankings of your home page.

Do you feel like your question has been answered or would you like to be more specific about your site and goals?

Cheers,

Everett

What EGOL said and what Sebes said combined. If you want to run your affiliate links through an internal 302 redirect first (so that you can better track click activity) then that is a pretty well established process. You'd want to nofollow those links, of course.

But cloaking? Nope. Don't even think about it.

I recently had an issue where the developers put up a global header nav that used javascript. The JS was in a folder called /js/, which was blocked in the robots.txt file. Within an hour the site was penalized. google still showed the global header nav in their preview so I know they rendered the JS. My guess is after rendering they said, hey wait - the page Chrome/Browser rendered for our preview doesn't look like the page our standard Googlebot sees. They must be cloaking.

Keep it simple and don't try to fool people who are a lot smarter than you. That's what I've learned over the years.

Hello mrlolalot (nice name, lol!),

As you already mentioned, Stores Direct has suggested what is about the best way to handle this, which is to not link the short description text, but to use it to improve usability. To that I would add, try to work in a few keyword phrases that are optimized for the page on which the short descriptions appear, which shouldn't be difficult since they are appearing on a category page that is relevant to the type of product they describe. I would also mention one potential downside of showing short descriptions on category pages is that products that live in multiple categories could have their short description showing on more than one page. Still, I think the reward is bigger than the risk as long as you don't have the same products in more than a couple categories. If most of your products are in four, five, six... categories than you're going to have a pretty big duplicate content problem on your hands.

Also as you already mentioned, linking the short description isn't going to do you much good since you're linking the product title above it, which is probably a far-better link to have anyway, keyword-wise. Linking the title of a product is the epitome or relevant anchor text. And I'd stay away from nofollow linking any internal page on the site with the exception of perhaps cart and account type pages, which should be noindexed in the meta tag and/or disallowed in the robots.txt file anyway.

But to answer your question: Yes, it can be a bad thing to display non-linked short product descriptions on the home page and category pages IF you aren't using the keywords for which you want the home and category pages to rank; and IF you are showing that same short description on several pages (i.e. multiple categories and the home page). But I do like short product descriptions to appear on category pages for reasons Stores Direct explained in his first answer. So my advice would be to adjust the keyword use if you can, while addressing the duplicate content problem if that is an issue.

Sometimes with these established sites you'll find the category pages already ranking for the product-level keywords and you may worry that changing the strategy will cause the page to no longer rank. An example:

Your widget category might rank for Small Purple Widget because you have a short description on there for your Small Purple Widget product. The question then becomes: Does your Small Purple Widget page also rank? If not, why not? That is what you, your users, and Google all want to rank. Everyone wants the same thing so it should be simple to fix. And if they both rank, then there really isn't a problem UNLESS - your category page doesn't rank for its own keyword, at which point you should think about adjusting the short description text (if it only appears on that one page) or removing it (if it appears on multiple pages).

As always, testing is key. You can take them out and see what happens. It isn't that difficult to add them back in on most systems.

Let us know if we're not understanding your question correctly.

Hello Clinthend,

Panda makes it difficult for user-generated content sites to control what and how much of their site gets indexed. It used to be that if a page didn't rank well it wasn't a big deal since that didn't affect the rest of the site. I certainly sympathize with your dilemma.

I think your idea sounds like a good way to approach it, though I'd probably go ahead and let users access the other geotargeted pages if you think they're useful (and if not, why have them at all, ever?) but block bots from indexing them. You can then allow indexing of particular ones as you get more high quality content onto them.

Good luck!

Everett @balibones

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

Hello Richard,

That is a great question and I'm impressed by your attention to detail with regard to page-rank distribution changing as things go in and out of stock.

To answer your question, I don't think you risk being penalized for displaying in this way any more than thousands of other sites, including huge brands, risk it by using drop-down divs (e.g. "read more" , "transcript") and tabbed product description areas (e.g. "sizes", "description", "technical details", "Shipping costs") to break up the pertinent information into bite-sized chunks for the user. I work on a site that has checkboxes the user can uncheck to hide certain items if they don't wish to see them. This all uses similar coding to what you have described.

As long as you never specifically target Google (as in say "If Googlebot, then show this content, else show this other content) I think you'll be fine.

With that said, you may want to look into using a View-All rel canonical page to take care of that page-rank distribution issue you mentioned, depending on how it impacts the load-time of the page and how many links you will be sending part of your page-rank to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html . If it were me I'd just stick to the solution you first asked about, but there are plenty of options.

Also think about the UX when a visitor lands on the out-of-stock product page. All it takes is a few quality raters or a few hundred organic visitors who land on that page while it's out of stock to give it a bad rating or a fast back-click to the SERPs and you could find yourself battling the effects of Panda, at least as far as I understand the process. Some options to improve that user experience include: Estimated date that the product will come back; ability to backorder; ability to sign up for an email alert when it gets back in stock; related product links with images.

Good luck!

Everett