I've been going through the process of adding Google sitemaps and notice there's a lot of "sort by" links that point to dynamically created pages that are all essentially the same page, just with the contents moved around. e.g bookstores.html bookstores.html?amp;sort=3a&page=1 bookstores.html?amp;sort=2d&page=1 On my directory sites, should I put nofollow on the "sort by name", "sort by location" type links?
I wouldn't bother. What you should do is try and create different titles for these pages so google likes them more.
Yes put nofollow tags. It's plausable that G might see similar content and levy some sort of penalty. Either way, if the content is the same then just have one link. And, if the title is the same then most definately you don't want that. I'd rather have 300 STRONG pages than 900 WEAK pages.
I agree. I had this same problem which left me with about 90 exact duplicate pages, just with different product orders. Definitely do a nofollow. We actually went further and blocked ?sort with robots.txt. From what I have seen, Yahoo and MSN don't care much about a nofollow tag, so we also used robots as well as nofollow.
I wouldnt worry about using nofollow. If Google sees some of the pages as duplicate, it will just ignore the extra pages.
Well I've added nofollow to the 'sort by' links. What about when the page has 2 identical links. Like in the main body of the page, and an identical link in the footer. Should I nofollow one of them?
I don't think I'd worry about this one. The page is the same either way, so it isn't a duplicate content issue. Unless you want to ensure that there is only one anchor text into the page, I'd just leave it the same.
Sure thing: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /user/ Disallow: /partners/ Disallow: ?sort Disallow: ?cat_sub Disallow: ?source Code (markup): We also has a few occurrences of spidered affiliate links, which were also removed. Also if you only use dynamic tags for tracking or sorting purposes, you can use this: