Our Twitter App

[ArenaFlowers.com]

Hi Mozzers,

We had a question about our twitter app  http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers-fun/flowers/home  This app sends messages out to tweeters for their Birthday, to say congratulations etc.

Our question relates to the fact that we are generating 1,000 of pages of content (like this:http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers-fun/flowers/message?id=394447 ) with some unique content, but these orphaned pages aren't really linked to and only have short-term traffic influx. Our question is whether these small, orphaned pages are likely to be seen as lots of random, low quality, low content pages - and whether that might hurt our Google ranking.  Sometimes the virtual cards are linked to by blogs and tweets etc, so we don't want them not indexed but equally, we don't want our rankings to be damaged by them.

Wonder if anyone has any thoughts, opinions or any similar experience?

Thanks,

Arena Flowers

[shabbychicoriginals]

I'm by no means an expert but I would have thought the best option would be to put a canonical tag in each of the specific messages pointing back to your app's main page.

That way any of your cards that do get indexed should end up helping the rankings for your app not the individual pages.

eg.

[StalkerB]

I like this idea best

You could also specify in webmaster tools to ignore the 'id' parameter but that's a bit risky depending on how the rest of your site is built.

[oznappies]

If you only have a few pages and then lots of the same with just a different id you could mark it as parameter in Google Webmaster Tools as Barry Suggests and add the canonical as John suggests. The one thing you would need to do in those cases is change your 302 to 301 on http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers-fun/flowers/message page when it redirects to home otherwise you will loose link juice.

I would also suggest you run your site through http://gtmetrix.com/ as the image load times were up to 15secs and print.css is returning a 404 error.  You should also run your home page through the On Page reports on SEOMoz.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Yes, rel=canonical seem perfect for this job.

And I highly recommend doing it, as so many pages might be seen as low-qualoty content by Google post-panda, and thereby hurt your entire site.