10,000 New Pages of New Content - Should I Block in Robots.txt?

[cmaddison]

I'm almost ready to launch a redesign of a client's website. The new site has over 10,000 new product pages, which contain unique product descriptions, but do feature some similar text to other products throughout the site.

An example of the page similarities would be the following two products:

1. Brown leather 2 seat sofa

2. Brown leather 4 seat corner sofa

Obviously, the products are different, but the pages feature very similar terms and phrases.

I'm worried that the Panda update will mean that these pages are sand-boxed and/or penalised.

Would you block the new pages? Add them gradually? What would you recommend in this situation?

[EGOL]

Consider reversing your thinking from "what will be my loss to panda" into "what can I do to make this site kick ass".

Reach for opportunity, extend yourself.

If this was my site I would get a writer on those product descriptions to make them unquestionably unique, beef them up, add salesmanship and optimize them for search.  This will give you substantive unique content, that converts better, pulls more long tail traffic and moves out of competition with other sites that do the minimal.

Sure, it will cost money but in the long run it could bring back a huge return.

My only caution on this is that if you make this investment in writing you need to do that on a site that has can pull reasonable traffic.  If you do this on a site that has no links it will not do you much good.  It is part of a marketing plan not a single item on a "to do" list.