Sgt_Kickaxe - 7:37 pm on Apr 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

- Canonical will tell Google which pages you want indexed.
- Robots.txt will tell Google which pages cannot be indexed.
- 301 redirect between identical pages will force the use of just one version
- Not creating multiple versions of a page will solve all problems from an indexing perspective.

If you can't achieve the last ideal then canonical is probably the best way to go. With canonical you will direct search traffic to the right version but not forcefully cut-off or block any potential good the other versions are creating, if any, such as incoming links of internal pagerank flow etc. Redirects may do well in limited use but I'm not sure you want 700 redirects in place that question trust.

It's better to say "this is the right page to index" than to try and forcefully block content.

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 7:39 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2011]