SEO - NOFOLLOW & NOINDEX

Hey Guys,

I administrate a website where we have 4,000 products which models change annually. I have product files sent to me by our suppliers however the product descriptions they supply are used by everyone so this has started to reflect badly for us in SEO terms.

I spent a vast amount of time replacing this content with unique content for the products that we list however still have a number of products that I wish to use supplied content for but don't want Google or any other search engine to see this a "duplicate content".

Therefore I think it's best that I flag these products pages as NOINDEX so they still show on my website but aren't displayed in the search engines.

Can anyone advise how I would add a tick box onto the product page to enable this or recommend an extension? I've tried searching for one but most SEO plugins want to promote the product page and not hide them! any idea's?

Thanks

J

Remember, some engines will not ignore "no" -- "no" attracts them.

that would requiere a total recode of opencarts productpages, as that part of meta tag is hard coded.

most simple way is to exclude those product in your robots.

http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html

Thanks for your replies

Maybe will look into an extension as don't want to change the core files.

It seems a few people are advising me that that using NOINDEX is more likely to harm your SEO ranking more than using duplicate product descriptions. Any truth in this?

Depends upon where you put it. It can (sort of) block access selectively. Engines that obey it will stay out of particular directories or linkage trails where they do not belong. Engines that snoop will see it as a beacon and go there. It can be used at the outset to proclaim that engines are unwelcome; good ones will stop, bad ones will see the beacon.

That mechanism is statistically weak. If you want to keep them out of somewhere, then password it, they do not (yet) "do" passwords; some try.