4 replies to this topic

[nic1]

our site has around 200,000 pages, of which 90,000 are temporary 'product' pages that are client edited and can last anywhere from a week to over a year.

with lots of talk of keeping link value and pagerank, we are looking at ways to try and keep link juice on the upper, permanent parts of our site. some ideas that have been suggested are:

• to restrict the entire 'product' directory using the disallow command in robots.txt
• to make all direct internal links to the 'product page' NOFOLLOW
• both of the above

contrarily, there is an opposite line of thought in that we should embrace this temporary content. some ideas being:

• to make all outgoing links on the 'product page' itself NOFOLLOW, but fully allow internal links
• to remove the 'product' directory from our sitemap, to try and accentuate that the content is not permanent
  both of the above

any thoughts/opinions?

[Jill]

If it were me, I'd do neither. I can't imagine there being anything wrong with having all those product pages indexed, even if they are temporary. What happens to them once the product is no longer available? Do you redirect them to something similar?

[nic1]

If it were me, I'd do neither. I can't imagine there being anything wrong with having all those product pages indexed, even if they are temporary. What happens to them once the product is no longer available? Do you redirect them to something similar?

hi jill, you seem to be everywhere we do, we have a custom 404 error page that then redirects to a list of 'similar' products. i think we may be getting caught up in this 'site sculpting' craze ... matt cutts's words make A LOT of people sit up and take notice.

on the face of it, it would seem logical that if you restrict google from certain pages of a site that other areas would gain more weight, but it always felt wrong to me. i try and compare our site to a traditional high street business ... and i guess hiding all your product doesn't make a lot of sense

[devilsmaster]

I dont understand one thing whenevr there is an error on the sites people just put the 404 error on the page, i mean what does it really do. No one put any other error message as Page is Destroyed or Page time Exited. Every one finds one error message only 404 erroe.

[Mitchelle Johnson]

Well, since your product pages are temporary and client edited, there should not be distribution of links from home page and top pages to product pages. it means that pr should not be distributed on product pages.....