I hope not. Didn't want to say it, but I'm kinda hating analytics :S I wonder if I would remain as a member if the pro version is ever removed.

I feel the same way! Even though I am forced to access Analytics by default, I then hit the "Back to Pro" not only because I am used to it, but also I find it easier to read. I really don't want to spend 10 minutes loading for pages and graphs, and the PRO version gives me just that, the info I need instantly.

I think the way you have your tags set is perfect. While having a robots=noindex tag allows google to read the page and pass pagerank, there's no point listing them in search results as they actually don't offer any valuable content; they link to, but they don't have it.

That said, google goes over your tag pages passing pagerank, which ultimately get more juice to your articles. Sometimes, within a post, you can link to a tag page within the content, so users can read more about certain topics and you are passing more juice to that tag page, although not being indexed, that tag page passes pagerank back to the articles.

The noindex has nothing (almost) to do with pagerank, it could be a tremendously useful page (you can even earn links to it from external sources), but they are only valuable to users reading your content and interested in a particular "subject" you mention within the post/context.

2 ways to do it with different effects:

1. Robots.txt in each subdomain. This will entirely block any search engine to even access those pages, so they won't know what they have inside.

   User-Agent:*

   Disallow: /

2. noindex tags in those pages. This method allows crawlers to read the page and maybe index (if you set a "follow") the pages to which you link to.or "nofollow" if you don't want the linked pages to be indexed either.

Hope that helps!

If I were going to disallow something I would go with noindex tags. The robots file is perfect with just those 2 lines.

Then, there are some plugins that will help you avoid any SEO issue like SEO by Yoast. Personally I like to noindex,follow tags, categories, and archive pages, that's it. But again, noindex, follow with a robots tag on the page, not using the robots.txt. SEO by Yoast will make that as easy as it can ever be with just a small configuration steps.

Give it a try, you can always disable plugins

Wish you the best!

You are welcome.

Hmmmm.. don't know about Yelp, I've seen others using 303 too, but still 302 seems to be the way to go.