Internal nofollows?

[YairSpolter]

We have a profile page on our site for members who join. The profile page has child pages that are simply more specific drill-downs of what you get on the main profile page. For example: /roger  displays all of roger's posts, questions, and favorites and then there are /roger/posts, /roger/questions, /roger/favorites.

Since the child pages contain subsets of the content on the main profile page, we canonical them back to the main profile page.

Here's my question:

The main profile page has navigation links to take you to the child pages. On /roger, there are links to:  /roger/posts, /roger/questions, and /roger/favorites. Currently, we nofollow these links. Is this the right way to do it? It seems to me that it's a mistake, since the bots will still crawl those pages but will not transfer PR. What should we do instead:

1. Make the links js links so the child pages won't be crawled at all?

2. Make the links follow so that PR will flow (see Matt Cutts' advice here)? Apprehension about doing this: won't it dilute crawl budget (as opposed to #1)?

3. Something else?

In case the question wasn't confusing enough... here's another piece:

We also have a child page of the profile that is simply a list of members (/roger/friends). Since this page does not have any real content, we are currently noindex/nofollow -ing it and the link to this page is also nofollow. I'm thinking that there's a better solution for this as well. Would love your input!

[Everett]

Hello Yair,

I think you're fine with NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta tags on those pages and either rel="nofollow" in the links to them or using javascript instead. Keep in mind that Google is getting pretty good at parsing javascript so they'll still crawl those pages (which means they'll still be using crawl budget), making it necessary to have the noindex tag on those pages.

Providing those pages aren't already in Google's index, I would consider adding a robots.txt file disallow, similar to the one below...

Disallow: /user//favorites
Disallow: /user//posts
Disallow: /user//questions
Disallow: /user//friends

The * is a wildcard that should apply this to every profile. You may or may not have a /user/ folder but I put it in there as an example.