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Thank you both for your responses. The css class comment totally makes sense. I'm surprised that the comments are nofollows... seems like an oversight!

I've been using open site explorer to assess my competitors inbound links. I filtered for "link equity" and returned these results. I noticed a link from meetup.com and investigated it further (a link on this page). As far as open site explorer is concerned this link is passing some value. That said, I noticed the link was actually posted as a comment on the meetup page. When I looked at the source it looked like this:

• [http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/members/82741532/](<a class=)" class="mem-photo-background-45 square-35 memberinfo-widget" data-memberid="82741532" title="Aleksandr Melentiev" style="display: block; background-image: url(http://img1.meetupstatic.com/501554713870081192606960/img/nobody_50.png);" data-src="http://img1.meetupstatic.com/501554713870081192606960/img/nobody_50.png">http://img1.meetupstatic.com/6297749526911517292/img/blank.gif" alt="Aleksandr Melentiev" />

  [http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/members/82741532/](<a class=)" class="memberinfo-widget" data-memberid="82741532" title="Aleksandr Melentiev">Aleksandr Melentiev

  Hi. I am the creator of a similar tool - [http://bootcamper.io](<a class=)" title="http://bootcamper.io" target="_blank" class="linkified">http://bootcamper.io­. Will do my best to attend this as well. Cheers.

  <a class="j-like-list tooltip-widget" data-key="reply-32914742-likes">1</a> · February 28

I don't see a nofollow attribute above but I do see the "linkified" class. Am I correct in assuming that this link is probably not passing value? Secondly, can meetup.com descriptions (as opposed to comments) contain follow links?

Thanks in advance for your time in answering my noob question!

Absolutely helpful. I really appreciate it. I think one real use case that I may want to solve for is the "focus" plus "city" combo. Ie: "data science schools in chicago". Based on the research I've done thus far I think that may be the only permutation really worth worrying about. Again - thanks a lot!

Thank you for your help in advance! I've read a ton of posts on this forum on this subject and while they've been super helpful I still don't feel entirely confident in what the right approach I should take it. Forgive my very obvious noob questions - I'm still learning!

The problem: I am launching a site (coursereport.com) which will feature a directory of schools. The directory can be filtered by a handful of fields listed below. The URL for the schools directory will be coursereport.com/schools. The directory can be filtered by a number of fields listed here:

• Focus (ex: “Data Science”)
• Cost (ex: “$<5000”)
• City (ex: “Chicago”)
• State/Province (ex: “Illinois”)
• Country (ex: “Canada”)

When a filter is applied to the directories page the CMS produces a new page with URLs like these:

• coursereport.com/schools?focus=datascience&cost=$<5000&city=chicago
• coursereport.com/schools?cost=$>5000&city=buffalo&state=newyork

My questions:

1)   Is the above parameter-based approach appropriate? I’ve seen other directory sites that take a different approach (below) that would transform my examples into more “normal” urls.

coursereport.com/schools?focus=datascience&cost=$<5000&city=chicago

VERSUS

coursereport.com/schools/focus/datascience/cost/$<5000/city/chicago (no params at all)

2)   Assuming I use either approach above isn't it likely that I will have duplicative content issues? Each filter does change on page content but there could be instance where 2 different URLs with different filters applied could produce identical content (ex: focus=datascience&city=chicago OR focus=datascience&state=illinois). Do I need to specify a canonical URL to solve for that case? I understand at a high level how rel=canonical works, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around what versions of the filtered results ought to be specified as the preferred versions. For example, would I just take all of the /schools?focus=X  combinations and call that the canonical version within any filtered page that contained other additional parameters like cost or city?

3. Should I be changing page titles for the unique filtered URLs?

4. I read through a few google resources to try to better understand the how to best configure url params via webmaster tools. Is my best bet just to follow the advice on the article below and define the rules for each parameter there and not worry about using rel=canonical ?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687

An assortment of the other stuff I’ve read for reference:

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/seo-clean-urls

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3857-SEO-When-Product-Facets-and-Filters-Fail

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-steps-to-seo-friendly-site-url-structure/59813/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html