Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?

[WMCA]

Hi,

We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory

We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be:

For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag.

1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"?

2. Is the x-default redundant?

Thanks for any input.

Cheers

WMCA

[LynnPatchett]

It depends a bit on your setup and how easy/difficult it is to implement the tags but a couple of things to have in mind:

NOINDEX, FOLLOW should still mean the hreflang tags on the page are seen and followed even though the page in question is not indexed, the page needs to be parsed for the crawler to read the meta tag.

If you are not facing some serious issue with crawling and your system automatically adds the canonical and hreflang tags then I would leave them as is even on the no indexed pages (you might for example want to start indexing the french pages but not the english pages of certain cat/brand etc combinations and the hreflang tags might help speed recognition of this kind of change to the crawlers).

For the x-default my understanding is it is mainly for use in a multinational setup with default landing pages and or auto lang/region redirections and your url suggests your are aiming at Canada (and maybe USA) and only for en/fr so my understanding is it might not be really crucial in this case. Check out this page for some more details.

[innovacy]

If the page isn't indexed, then neither a hreflang or canonical URL makes any sense, as search engines would ignore that page alltogether.