robots.txt "disallow" vs. rel="noindex" vs. rel="canonical"

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by infilta, Feb 23, 2011.

  1. #1
    Hey I have a question.
    We have some index pages that can be filtered / sorted and paginated.
    We want SE's to index only index pages with pagination params but ignore and thus not to pass any PR to index pages with sort / filter params in the URL.

    To the best of my knowledge there are 4 ways of doing it:
    1) making these links invisible (e.g. by adding them dynamically with JS).
    2) adding rel="noindex" to these links. According to this source "PageRank not passed to destination".
    3) adding rel="canonical" meta tag with current page URL sans sort/filter params.
    4) using robots.txt syntax to disallow indexing pages with these params, e.g.
    Disallow: /*?sort=*
    Disallow: /*&sort=*
    etc.

    Last option seems like the easiest site wide solution as you don't have to change any HTML / JS. But I am not sure if disallowing page from indexing would actually prevent from passing PR to these pages IF they have links from within the site that are not rel="nofollow" 'd.

    Please let me know what you think.
     
    infilta, Feb 23, 2011 IP