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It's not ideal. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to guess how Google will interpret that, and it can vary a lot with the situation. In theory, a 301+canonical could work like a chained 301-redirect. A two-link 301 chain isn't great, but it's not awful, and it will pass some link-juice. A 301+canonical is probably slightly worse, in practice, I doubt the outcome is consistent across sites.

Keep in mind, too, that a 301 lands the user on a new URL, whereas a canonical doesn't. So, this could cause more people to link to the intermediate page, bookmark it, etc. (also not ideal).

I'm curious - why can you set up a 301 to an intermediate page but no to the target page. It seems like you'd need more CMS access to do what you did then solve the original problem.

The short answer is: Yes We're actually working on collecting the data for a 2013 report, but we don't have a firm ETA at this point. One of our new team members on Data Science is almost full-time on ranking factors - it's a project we take very seriously. Every time we do it, though, it gets a bit harder and more complicated.

I'd agree with Irving that NOINDEX will solve the problem (remove the risk), but I think you could cross-domain rel=canonical. This sounds like a syndication type of situation - you're not claiming credit for the content, but you think it has value to your visitors. So, give the credit to the originating site.

There was a syndication-source option, but Google has quietly deprecated that, unfortunately.

GWT numbers sometimes ignore parameter handling, oddly, and can be hard to read. I'm only seeing about 40 indexed pages with "ref" in the URL, which hardly seems disastrous. One note - once the pages get indexed, for whatever reason, de-indexing can take weeks, even if you do everything correctly. Don't change tactics every couple of days, or you're only going to make this worse, long-term. I think canonicals are fine for this, and they should be effective. It just may take Google some time to re-crawl and dis-lodge the pages. You actually may want to create an XML sitemap (for Google only) that just contains the "ref=" pages Google has indexed. This can nudge them to re-crawl and honor the canonical. Otherwise, the pages could sit there forever. You could 301-redirect - it would be perfectly valid in this case, since those URLs have no value to visitors. I wouldn't worry about the Bing sitemaps - just don't include the "ref=" URLs in the Bing maps, and you'll be fine.

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.

It looks like Google hasn't re-cached that page since you were added:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NsrjhuIfo_QJ:www.topmba.com/qs-world-mba-tour/partners+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

So, the links may just not have taken effect yet.

Argh... sorry, I meant "happy to look" (not "link") - my typos are the worst I was curious what page on TopMBA.com had the link, so that I could help assess any quality issues.

Ah, sorry - yeah a DA=7 and an mR=7 are very different

We're getting new indexes about every couple of weeks now, I think, but it depends not only on the domain, but on how deep the page is in the domain and what the quality is of that page. Some pages, even on good domains, don't carry much weight.

Also keep in mind that, even once Google has cached it, the impact of a handful of links is rarely immediate or even noticeable. It's much more complex than that, so ultimately you've got to keep doing what you're doing. It doesn't really matter what our stats say or Majestic's stats if you're not ranking. In other words, don't build a few links and then sit around waiting for the metrics to update. Keep rolling forward.

If you want to post a sample link, I'd be happy to look, but I realize this question is public, so I'm not sure if that's viable for you.

Oh, so it's site-wide... got it. The issue is that you're basically sending Google a signal that the non-canonical URLs are canonical. It's not a disaster, but it would be better to remove them temporarily, until you can put the correct tags in place.

Our general opinion (obviously, we're biased) is that the SEOmoz stats are better at tracking high-quality links, but the Majestic stats are fresher and track recent links better - if I had to over-simplify it. When you say your "domain value number" is 7, do you mean MozRank? What are your DA/PA stats like?

Keep in mind that, regardless of which numbers you use, these are only two pieces of the ranking puzzle, which has hundreds of factors. Our MozRank and MozTrust are analogous to Google PageRank and TrustRank, but there are many other factors in link quality and there are many ranking factors that have nothing to do with links.

If your site is only a month old, it's even harder to get a clear picture, as Google may still be assessing you. Your ranking could move a lot in the next few weeks.

One of our community members recently wrote a post that's a pretty good introduction to other ranking factors:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/going-beyond-moz-metrics-to-answer-why-is-this-site-outranking-me

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.

I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding the situation - did they just put the canonical tag on the one page? Does that page drive any other content/URLs ("page" is a bit of a loaded term, since one file could create 100s of URLs that Google can crawl)?

If they simply added it to one page and the canonical references itself, there shouldn't be any harm. It sounds like this page is the canonical version, so you're really just telling Google that. It's not necessary, in most cases, but it's not a problem.