Affiliate Marketing: No-Follow for Product-Pages

Dear community,

This is my first post in this forum! I am looking forward to an active exchange with you all!

My first question to you is the following: Is it better for the SEO of my website to mark the product pages with “no-follow”?

Some context: It’s about a website that promotes a variety of products from different eCommerce shops via affiliate marketing. The website is structured like an eCommerce shop: There are categories that list a multitude of products, there are subcategories, product pages, and blogs.

The user reaches a category page and can click either to go to the product page or directly to the offer at the affiliate partner.

Due to the large number of products offered, the product pages contain little additional information besides product names and images.

Since there are similar and identical products from different eCommerce shops, many product pages are classified as “Duplicate Content”.

Moreover, there are several thousand products.

Hence my question, whether it is worthwhile to exclude the product pages from search engines. Mainly for two possible reasons:

•   “Duplicate” and thin content -> Can this negatively affect the overall SEO of my website?
•   “Link Juice”: Due to the multitude of products, the category pages might lose ranking potential, as the “Link Juice” is passed on to the product pages.

The goal is, among other things, to achieve a good ranking for the category pages. However, since the relevant keywords for ranking the category pages are competitive, and my website currently has hardly any authority, the original consideration was to first achieve a good ranking for the product pages, as the relevant keywords are long-tail keywords.

I hope the situation and the dilemma are clearly described!

If further information is needed, please let me know!

I am looking forward to your suggestions and recommendations!

Best regards