Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow

[DROIDSTERS]

Hi Mozzers

I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it.

So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes,

I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*.

So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs)

If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt

Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow?

PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Chris Captivate.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not a fan of doubling up, but only because it makes the results really hard to measure. If you implement both, you won't know which one worked, ultimately. I'm not sure it's actually harmful - it just can be hard to track.

If you're just trying to prevent future problems (and don't have any immediate issues), I'd probably pick one and give it a few weeks.

[DROIDSTERS]

Hi Dr Pete

Thank you so much for your input, I really appreciate it. Always fun learning something new

I also don't prefer the engine-specific approach. However, could it hurt implementing both solutions?

Regards,

Chris Captivate.

[Dr-Pete]

A couple of options here. First off, though, there's really no rel="noindex" at the link level. You can "nofollow" a link, and that generally disrupts indexing, but it's not guaranteed. You're right that it can look like PR sculpting, although that's not a huge issue if your usage makes sense. In other words, if you're using rel=nofollow to keep the crawlers away from content with low search value, I generally think that's ok.

You could META noindex, nofollow the target pages, although then Google has to crawl those. The advantage is that I find the META Robots approach to be a bit more powerful.

The other option is to use parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools (Bing has a similar function) to tell Google to ignore the "?filter" parameter. The purist in me doesn't love the engine-specific approach, but it's easier, you don't need to change the site itself, and it typically works fairly well.