robots - noindex, nofollow on sorted pages by querystring vars

Question about robots-noindex, nofollow on sorted pages by querystring vars

[fixxation]

Sorry I think I posted this in the wrong forum, can any mods that see this move it to a SEO category? Cheers.

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HI everyone, first post here-- looks like a great forum here.

I've been reading through the posts, and I'm trying to find an answer for a SEO query that I'm having a bit of trouble finding an answer to. It's with regards to duplicate content because of sorting a list through query string variables being passed into the same page.

Say I have a page showing hotels in Dublin:

[hotelsite.com]/dublin

Now the headers in the tables have links to the same page with different query string variables, so that the user can sort the list of hotels, but I don't want these sorted pages to be crawled by search engines, and from what I read, the rel="nofollow" attribute in the anchor tags is not the best way to go for internal links.

If my sorted pages are something like:

[hotelsite.com]/dublin?sort_by=hotel_name&order=ASC

...and if I were to include a <meta robots="noindex,nofollow"> on the sorted pages, will the search engines know that my plain old default page ( /dublin ) is safe to crawl and should be indexed? I just really want to make sure that when including this robots tag (on the sorted pages) that it won't score against me on the original unsorted page.

Thanks in advance.
A.