Correct strategy for long-tail keywords?

[JohanMattisson]

Hi,

We are selling log houses on our website. Every log house is listed as a "product", and this "product" consists of many separate parts, that are technically also products. For example a log house product consists of doors, windows, roof - and all these parts are technically also products, having their own content pages.

The question is - Should we let google index these detail pages, or should we list them as noindex?

These pages have no content, only the headline, which are great for long-tail SEO. We are probably the only manufacturer in the world who has a separate page for "log house wood beam 400x400mm". But otherwise these pages are empty.

My question is - what should we do? Should we let google index them all (we have over 3600 of them) and maybe try to insert an automatic FAQ section to every one of them to put more content on the page?

Or will 3600 low-content pages hurt our rankings? Otherwise we are ranking quite well.

Thanks, Johan

[zeepartner]

That amount is probably a bit too much. I guess you want to bundle your efforts more into top-hierarchy overview pages. Keep in mind that users hardly will perform specific searches for something like "log house wood beam 400x400mm"...

Usually it's a better choice to have one landing page for the product and let users customize via dropdown (to chose 400mm, 600mm, etc.). This will reduce your amount of pages and probably leads to a better user experience too.

[JohanMattisson]

Hi, Philipp!

Thank You for the response. Visitors currently do not see these options anyway, they are only in the system because of our custom pricing quote system.

I think my main question is, should we hide these pages from google or should we list them in our sitemap. Our site visitors will never see these pages, but they do exist. We can make them noindex, if google may not look well at them.

[zeepartner]

Hej Johan!
Ah okay, then the answer is easier: If your visitors won't be able to see those sites, Google must not access them either.

I also suggest not to list them in an XML-Sitemap since only pages with value for users should be listed there. As you asked above, IMO these 3600 low quality pages would not have a positive impact - they might even hurt you.
Focus on pushing those sites for search engines that are of value to users.
Cheers,
Phil

[JohanMattisson]

Thank You very much, Philipp. We will change our website according to your suggestions

Have a great week! Johan