Defining Canonical First and Later No Indexing

[Modi]

We found some repetitive pages on site which has mostly sort or filter parameters, tried lot to remove them but nothing much improvement

Is it correct way that:-

a) We are creating new pages altogther of that section and putting up rel canonical tag from old ones to new ones

b) Now, after canonical declared, we will noindex the old pages

Is it a correct way to let new pages supercede the old pages with new pages.

[CleverPhD]

Happy Monday to you!

I agree with Mike - you need to use the 301 redirect to point from the old pages to the new pages.

If you are reworking the site, and have to use parameters, consider dropping the parameters in a hash - this hides them to the bots and you get full SEO benefit for links

Credit Rand for this excellent walk through - http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

There are other ways to deal with parameters and re-sorts of a result page, but it depends on your situation.  Bottom line, if you are going through the effort of a site restructure, don't set yourself up to end up with the same problem you have now. Figure out what your "Golden URLs" are for categories and products around key words and then find a way to "hide" all the other versions of those same pages (in this example you want to hide all the re-sorted and search result pages) from Google.  This is why I would often use a "no follow, no index" meta tag on a page vs a canonical.  Do not waste GoogleBot's time crawling a bunch of pages that you are not wanting to rank anyway. Setup the structure so the crawl is clear and focused on the pages that are the most important.

Cheers!

[MikeRoberts]

1. If you have older content and you create newer relevant content that you want people to see instead of the older content, you likely want a 301 redirect. In this way, all (mostly all) of the link equity is passed to the newer content which will eventually rank in place of the older content.

2. If you have duplicate pages like those caused by a parameter where site.com/page1 is the same as site.com/page1?this=x then you should canonicalize the page and its parameters to site.com/page1. In this way, the search engines understand that page1 is the real version of the content and thanks to the canonical will eventually take the place of the parametered versions that had been appearing in the SERPs.

Appendix to 1... down the road, those older pages that were redirect may wind up with no more links pointing to them from anywhere and no traffic going to them. At this point you may consider just 404ing the older page if you'd like to clean up older, less useful redirects.

Appendix to 2... A Canonical is a suggestion, not a directive. This means that the search engines do not have to follow it if they feel it is not entirely relevant.