To list or not to list? Products that contain basic info only, yet show off product depth...

[Kevin_McLeish]

Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description... each item/category is it's own unique web page with basic info like Brand, Model, What it is, Price, & Quantity in stock.  For searchers knowing what they want, they can quickly find us via the basic info & see that we have it in stock.  But for someone surfing our site, it's not all that attractive or informative as you are scrolling down the category list.  Collecting the picture & info can be a slow and time consuming process, but something we'd love to be all caught up on one day.  Would it be wiser to take these pages off, or keep them on until they are fully updated with pic & more detail?

(My thought is that even though they don't contain a lot of individual detail depth, they still add a substantial quantity of basic related content to the category page that they reside in.  This basic info on these items are also given a chance to burn into the web search engines over a longer period of time.  As time goes by and their content is improved, they will get re-crawled/re-indexed with their new information depth.  Also, even though they don't look all that pretty, it shows off our product depth... if we only listed the items that looked spectacular, then a lot of our categories would only contain a wimpy 3 out of 30 items that we actually have for sale.  That feels like a huge misrepresentation of how much selection we actually have to offer.  But perhaps this is wrong thinking?)  Thanks, Kevin

[EGOL]

Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description...

If this information is all you got on a single page - and you have a lot of these pages - then you need to fix this or you will be hit by a Panda problem.

Since about two years ago Google has been demoting the entire site in the rankings if you have a lot of these pages.  I have pages with short content and they have been noindexed.  I am slowly writing substantive content for these (250 words to 500 words) and when that goes live I start getting long tail traffic and rank much higher than they were originally.

This is long boring work.  I have these pages prioritized by potential income and plug away at writing them a few each week.