Should I add my refer a friend pages to my sitemap?

[donquixote]

We added a refer a friend page to all of our product pages so they look like this.

http:// www . domain . com / product1 / friend /

Each refer a friend page contains the exact identical form with the name of our product in the header. Would it be worth it to add all of these URLs to our sitemap.xml and our

http:// www . domain . com / sitemap.html

page?

thanks,
Donny

[wige]

In my opinion, No. For two reasons.

First, these pages are most likely going to be visited as an afterthought, once someone sees the product and decides to refer it, rather than as an initial destination. Unless of course the visitor was referred through the page, in which case they are not looking at the site map anyway.

Second, if the page is only different except for one small line of text (I take it you mean that all of the refer a friend pages are identical except for the title, not that the friend page is only slightly different from the product page), what benefit will you get from the search engines indexing the multitude of slight variants of this form? This is unlikely to be a desirable landing page, and most likely won't have any content that would be taken into consideration by the search engines. Depending on the page itself, I might even go so far as to nofollow the links to the page, and add a noindex header tag.

[Jeremy80]

I would not include these pages as they do not have sufficient content to be useful. Adding these kinds of pages may be considered spammy. Search engines don't particular like dynamic pages that change very little to become hundreds of pages.

[shakir]

ID did not add also google will crawl so what is the use of not adding.. If not wants crawl better work with robot.txt

[donquixote]

In my opinion, No. For two reasons.

First, these pages are most likely going to be visited as an afterthought, once someone sees the product and decides to refer it, rather than as an initial destination. Unless of course the visitor was referred through the page, in which case they are not looking at the site map anyway.

Second, if the page is only different except for one small line of text (I take it you mean that all of the refer a friend pages are identical except for the title, not that the friend page is only slightly different from the product page), what benefit will you get from the search engines indexing the multitude of slight variants of this form? This is unlikely to be a desirable landing page, and most likely won't have any content that would be taken into consideration by the search engines. Depending on the page itself, I might even go so far as to nofollow the links to the page, and add a noindex header tag.

Thanks Wige, you are obviously Wige beyond your years (how many times have you heard that? ).

What are the dangers if I leave it alone? I enjoy my current seo rankings today. I'm #2 in my top keyword. So I'm afraid to change existing onsite stuff, I am afraid of placing "no follows" and "no index". If I leave this the way it is, will it hurt me? Is this what is keeping me from rank #1?

thanks,
Donny

[wige]

I don't think leaving it alone will hurt you. Adding nofollow or noindex might have a small effect on streamlining your internal page rank, but you probably would not notice a major change. I probably wouldn't do that unless the page started showing up in place of a more relevant page in the SERPs. Of course, I tend to be conservative myself regarding nofollows.

[webdesigntaxi]

As far as seo goes, that page will be fine if left in the sitemap. For visitor purposes though you have to consider how easy it is to find in your main pages. If it is a prominant link then people will find it easily. Otherwise they may go to the sitemap to look for it. I always think "convenience" for the visitor when creating websites.

[AliMustafa]

I wouldn't suggest you doing the same , reasons are same as given above...