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"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
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We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure:
domain.com/country/resort/hotel
domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts
domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images
domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions
domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps
domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental
Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on
.../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion
and
.../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion
The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1.
These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines.
But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content?
Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text.
Right now we have intros like:
When you visit the hotel ...
instead of:
When you visit Alcudia Sea Club
But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do?
What would you do and why?
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I guess it depends on what is the intention behind these pages? Are you attempting to get more traffic for search? Or, are these pages simply for people visiting the site? If it is more about people and not search engines, I wouldn't really worry about the duplicate content issues (provided the pages make sense to users). Adding a nofollow to the links referencing these pages (and a noindex,follow on these pages) will prevent Google from crawling unnecessary pages and indexing unnecessary pages.
I've had similar situations come up (it always seems to on large sites). Typically what I've tried to do is identify which pages have the best shot at getting activity within the search results (based on keyword research, link research, etc.). On those pages, I do everything I can to have really unique content that sets those pages apart (I'm talking bigger scale changes, as opposed to geo-targeting changes). For the other pages where there isn't such a great chance with search engines, I use the nofollow tag to prevent Google from accessing those pages. That seems to help keep the focus for SEO on the right pages.
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