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.
