Should I no-index Product Pages on an Ecommerce Site?

[Titan243]

Is there any harm in no-indexing product pages? They’re all orphan pages, so I’m trying to solve that issue in Ahrefs.

The person I’m helping out rather no-index the pages than display all 100+ of them if it doesn’t affect SEO. I don’t see how doing this would affect SEO since these pages aren’t bringing in traffic, but figured it was worth asking.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Is there any harm in no-indexing product pages? They’re all orphan pages, so I’m trying to solve that issue in Ahrefs.

The person I’m helping out rather no-index the pages than display all 100+ of them if it doesn’t affect SEO. I don’t see how doing this would affect SEO since these pages aren’t bringing in traffic, but figured it was worth asking.

If they're orphaned then that's telling Google they aren't that important. That's going to restrict the amount of page rank they receive majorly, too, meaning they won't rank as well as they could. The quality of these pages may be poor, depending on if you guys have taken the time to create custom text, product descriptions, whatever. They could be "thin" and drag down your Panda quality score.

I think it really depends, but I've seen a lot of ecommerce sites worry about ranking categories for keywords rather than product pages. And having product pages indexed causes a LOT of cannibalization issues. It might be a good move to set them to noindex if all of this is describing your situation and you don't intend on ranking the products (and they don't have decent keywords anyways).

 

[Titan243]

If they're orphaned then that's telling Google they aren't that important. That's going to restrict the amount of page rank they receive majorly, too, meaning they won't rank as well as they could. The quality of these pages may be poor, depending on if you guys have taken the time to create custom text, product descriptions, whatever. They could be "thin" and drag down your Panda quality score.

I think it really depends, but I've seen a lot of ecommerce sites worry about ranking categories for keywords rather than product pages. And having product pages indexed causes a LOT of cannibalization issues. It might be a good move to set them to noindex if all of this is describing your situation and you don't intend on ranking the products (and they don't have decent keywords anyways).

Sounds like no-index is the way to go then. These product pages are sent directly to customers who want consulting services, which just takes them to a checkout page.