Should I noindex, nofollow a lot of child pages?

[jampaper]

Some category pages on my website have A LOT of product pages in them. Many of these pages do not receive any sort of organic traffic. Is there a reason for Google to be crawling these pages? Should I noindex, nofollow these pages to make Google's life a little easier? Could I possibly see some benefits from this or should I leave it the way it is?

[irvingw]

it all comes down to the amount of content on the pages. hyper targeted pages like sizes usually don't get enough editor attention or have enough unique content written about them to make them valuable and in that case a main page listing the sizes will suffice because they will rank for those sizes if the content is on the page because it is so extremely long tail...and protects you from panda. I just went through this exercise with a pool company who had several brands and multiple sizes and we opted to not get so granular.

[MikeRoberts]

Having pages that no one goes to won't negatively affect the rankings of the rest of your site.

In your case if you're really concerned about those obscure pages and they're thin or duplicate content, you could choose one really popular product in each category (such as "6x6x4 red foil gift box") and add canonical tags on the other similar products in that category (i.e. all the other red box pages) pointing to the popular one.

[CleverPhD]

I would say leave them in there as you want Google to see everything on your site that might be relevant to the user.

I think you are referring to what some call Crawl Optimization or Crawl Budget (great article here http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization) and yes there is something to making sure that you do not waste Google's time in crawling pages that do not matter.

I would still think that product pages are worth Google's time if you have good content and also, these are the things that you sell. Seems that Google would not only want to see your category pages, but what items are in a category.  One thing to note, all of those "red box" product pages all link up to the "red box" category page.  That is part of what makes the "red box" category authoritative within your site as you are telling Google this with your internal link structure.  You may find that if you noindex your product pages, your category pages may go down.

The use of the noindex/nofollow to help with Crawl Optimization is really more for pages like search pages, or pages that can be resorted 100 different ways with 100 different URLs.  Those are all duplicates and waste Googles time. Your product pages are really different animals and so my vote would be to keep them in the crawl.

[jampaper]

Thanks for the response. The thing is these small product pages are too obscure for anyone to find. Many are differentiated only by product size.

For example:

If someone types in "red boxes" into google, we will rank for “red boxes”. On this category page, we have 24 different red box products such as "6x6x4 Red Foil Gift Box" and "5 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 Red Glossy Box." Sure, if somebody searched for a "6x6x4 Red Foil Gift Box," our page would show. But nobody is going to search that. There are ways to eliminate some of these extra pages, but it would be less user friendly for a customer clicking through the site.

My question is, if Google sees that these pages consistently get no organic traffic, even if they might rank for some obscure keyword, can keeping these pages have a negative effect on my rankings?

[CleverPhD]

I would think you would want Google to find your product pages and then get you traffic for them.  I dont think the solution is to use noindex as that would take them out of the index for sure.

I am betting that either due to your site archtecture or how you have your sitemap setup or even possibly that you have thin content on all the product pages are more of the issue.

If you don't want to work on any of those things, sure you can noindex all of your product pages, but then it just seems like you are giving up and limiting your long term outlook for ranking pages in Google.

The only reason I would use the noindex in a case like yours would be to keep duplicate product or category pages out of the index.  Additionally, I would use that also to keep Google out of any of your search result pages, shopping cart etc.  Those are the pages that are wasting Google's time.  That brings up another point, are you having Google crawl a bunch of duplicate content on your site and that is why it never gets to the "good" content pages?

Good luck!