[Ecommerce] Should I No-index Product Pages

[KevinOH]

I'm setting up a store for my affiliate site, which I'm journaling about here.

I've been approved by a supplier to carry their products. They've given me their CSV file that I can integrate into my Woo shop to automatically import the products.

The problem is that there are about 4000 products. I feel that suddenly creating 4000 new product pages will impact the site negatively in terms of SEO. You know, the products come with the manufacturer's descriptions and bland copy, which I assume is also used by other partners of the supplier.

So, should I no-index the products?

I was thinking I no-index the products, and then index them one-by-one as I work on their copy, titles, descriptions, etc.

If that's the case, is there a way to mass no-index the products? The products' URL follow this format: https://www.mysite.com/shop/product

Is there a way I can no-index content that is generated after the /shop/ URL without going through the URLs one by one?

I'm using RankMath on the site, if this would help.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I would noindex those pages for the exact reason you've described. You won't receive search traffic, and you'll decrease your site quality score by bloating out your indexation with low-quality pages.

You have several options to get this done, but since you're using RankMath and WooCommerce... My understanding is that WooCommerce products are Custom Post Types (CPT). RankMath provides a means to set all posts within a CPT to noindex.

RankMath has a support page for this question: RankMath No-index Custom Post Type

The answer is to go into the RankMath plugin dashboard, click on Titles & Meta, look for a section with the name of your CPT ("products" in your case, I think), and then you can find an option called "Custom Robots Meta" and set them all to noindex.

That support page even has a video showing how to do it but I couldn't get it to load.