Thank you for the comprehensive response this is greatly appreciated my friend.
Yes, I agree. I have since read further and have completely ruled out blocking (robots txt. etc) as an option.
I went back and read some more Moz/SEO articles and I think I have narrowed it down to either:
a) canonicals pointing from the landing pages to the core website category pages
b) NoIndex/Follow tags on the landing pages
Basically, I think the key contextual factors to keep in mind are that:
- The landing pages are basically just sent to people directly by our recruiters in emails and over the phone, so they are almost counted as direct traffic.
- It just contains a form and doesn't encourage click through into our core website beside logo etc. - we just want them to register directly on that page.
- Over the past year, the visits on the landing pages were much, much less, and the bounce rate and exit % was higher.
- my manager has told me to prioritise the SEO towards the core category pages as they see the landing pages as purely for UX/registrations/useful to internal business recruiting practices rather than encouraging organic traffic.
I think canonicals would probably work the best since in some cases the landing pages were ranking higher than the category pages and it should hopefully transfer a bit of ranking power to the category pages.
But perhaps you are right and I can batch apply canonicals monitor the results and then progress.
Once again, thank you for your response.
