A very basic seo question

[Grumpy_Carl]

Sorry, been a long day and wanted a second opinion on this please....

I am developing an affiliate store which will have dozens of products in each category. We will not be indexing the product pages themselves as they are all duplicate content. The plan is to have just the first page of the category results indexed as this will have unique content about the products in that section. The later pagnated pages (ie pages 2,3,4,5 etc) will have 12 products on each but no unique content. Would the best advice be to add a canonical tag to all pages in the 'chairs' category pointing to the page with the first 12 results and the descriptions? This would ensure that the visitors are able to browse many pages of product but google won't index products 13 and onwards. Am I right in my thinkings?

A supplemental question. What is the best way to block google from indexing/crawling 90,000 product listings which are pulled direct from the merchant so are not unique in the least. I have previous played with banning google from the product folder but it reports health issues in webmaster tools. Would the best route be a no index tag on all the product pages and to no follow all the products in the category listings?

Many thanks

Carl

[dpdeleon1]

It seems like you may have done it already so I apologize if this something you've done but can you use your htaccess to block all robots from the folder?

[Highland]

You might want to elaborate on why you have pages of duplicate content. I'm not sure I understand that point. Normally I'd say let your list be indexed and canonical the products. In fact, I'm not sure if a canonical on a list would help all that much.

Nofollow links don't pass PR. They are still spidered and ranked. A robots would work best to exclude an entire section of your website. And, yes, Webmaster tools will complain because you've cordoned off a large section of your site.

I seriously hope you have some unique content on your site somewhere because it sounds like you just de-indexed all your pages!