Hey guys - have a question on everyones experience doing NOINDEX, FOLLOW on their sort or pagination pages. IE www.domain.com/category/sport/sort-PopularToday and www.domain.com/category/sport/page-2 and www.domain.com/category/sport/sort-PopularToday/page-2 for examples - the main page would be www.domain.com/category/sport I am thinking about doing a NOINDEX, FOLLOW tag on all these pages - I do link to these pages from top and bottom of these category pages, but think it might be best just to index the main category pages to push more juice to them. On these sort pages I do have unique title/h1/meta tags - which are Page 1 - Sport.......or Most Popular Sport, etc. What does everyone think or have experienced in doing this? Thanks a ton!!
I have some very large sites that have sort and pagination on them. After getting ranked in Google for several thousand long tail keywords I went and checked my site stats for the sorted and paginated pages. Guess what, the only pages that got search engine traffic were the main topic pages. No sort or page 2, etc. variations ever got hit as a landing page. So I put noindex, nofollow on all those pages. It has helped my rankings on the main landing page for each topic. I'm guessing it's because in Google's eyes there is less duplicate content and the PR and link juice is focused more on those landing pages now. Check your site stats and see if you're getting any search engine traffic from your sort and pagination pages. That might help you make a decision.
thanks for the input and would love to hear from others question - did you remove urls in webmaster central after implementing or did you just let google go as they went to them? Thanks.
I totally agree with freelistfool post, it's the best way to focus PR values for your important pages
thanks - do you also think that after implementing should remove them all via wild card or just let googlebot see as it goes? thanks
Just implement the Noindex, Follow and let Google sort it over time. What i would be inclined to do also is add a Nofollow to the paginated URL's in your template so you no longer pass anything to them and all the "juice" is flowing to the one unique copy. This is called link consensus.
right now im noindex,follow - i want it to go to those pages and find the content on them is why i have done follow.... thanks let me know what you think