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Thanks for the info.

For more information, let me try and explain the scenario a little better.

When using a template to generate all product page on a site, often these are designed in a way so that any URLs of the form "www.example.com/product/{something}" will map to a script called "GenerateProductPage.java" likely based on the rule that anything in the /product/ directory will map there (or .asp etc depending on the language being used).

On the site, there are only going to be links to the actual products that are stored in the DB, so for a user there are no issues there.

But Google manages to find all manor of strange URLs and since they are of the form "www.example.com/product/{random_text_here}" then this also will 'try' and generate a product page. Since there is no actual product in the database called 'random_text_here' then this will result in an empty product page with nothing there except the template navigation, footer links and menus etc.

We currently are doing as you mentioned, by "noindex, follow" the pages for the same reasons you listed.

So the question was; is this ok to do? is this bad to do? (if so why). Is there any harm in doing things the current way? Should we be 404'ig the pages (and what value does this have over the other methods?) etc.

Thanks for your input Carlo as it shows your thoughts are along the same lines as ours.

Has anyone else got anything to add to the information provided?

Thanks

Thanks for the response.

I guess what I was getting at with the question is when websites are built on flexible platforms and can easily create these pages automatically.

For example, if there was flexible URLs in place whereby URLs such as www.example.com/product/{product_name} all mapped to one script which generated a product page.

So www.example.com/product/{invalid_product_name} would also work and essentially show a blank product page.

The question being, how is the best way to handle these for Google and is there any benefit/harm from either of the methods outlined in the original question.

Has anyone else any thoughts on best ways to handle these scenarios?

Thanks

With large database/template driven websites it is often possible to get a lot of pages with no content on them.

What are the current thoughts regarding these pages with no content, options;

1. Return a 200 header code with noindex meta tag

2. Return a 404 page & header code

3. Something else?

Thanks