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My SERPs for a competitive term I felt I underperforming for dropped about 10 spots overnight after I added "noindex,follow" to the product pages. From the 3rd page to the 4th page, so it's not like I had a lot to lose. My SERPs for less competitive long tail keywords, which is where I'm getting most of my traffic, have dropped slightly or stayed the same.

Should I cross my fingers and hope for a recovery? Revert the product pages back to "index, follow"? Any thoughts?

Hi Tom,

Thanks so much for the thorough response.

Based on several comparative metrics with sites that are outranking me significantly, I do feel the site is underperforming. Because our traffic is ridiculously seasonal the Panguin Tool doesn't provide any clues.

I just added to all my products using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. We'll see what happens.

Thanks,
Zach

I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products.

Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site.

Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?