Using nofollow for reductive navigation?

[pressureducla]

Although Cutts has said that using nofollow for internal links is a no no, I have not seen a discussion anywhere regarding the use of nofollow on reductive navigation links.

We have our link structure setup pretty solid, however when somebody gets to a final landing page we provide the customer with reductive navigation on that page to further narrow the product selection. However, we do not want Google to follow these reductive links as the resulting product pages have duplicate product subsets of the previous page. I fear that the reductive navigation pages could take away from the main landing page that is our focus.

Thoughts on using nofollow or another technique to stop Google from giving any weight to the narrowed reductive pages.

Just to note: Target currently uses nofollow on their reductive navigation, wherein Amazon does not.

[ErnestHemingway]

Hello,

Nofollow could be the best option. Our friend MC has said many things I am not sure if you should follow everything he says. I have noindex/nofollow on all useless pages that I feel should not have any juice flowing through, for instance contact, about and privacy pages.

[pressureducla]

Yea, that is my initial thought as well. I wonder if reductive navigation hurts the main landing page with or without nofollows in the first place? It is amazing that there is not real discussions out there about reductive navigation and its effects on SEO. Reductive nav is a pretty solid mainstay on every major ecommerce site today.

[Robert Charlton]

Very quick comment. To keep these pages out of the index, but preserve useful PR, I myself would use "noindex,follow".

rel="nofollow" on links, or "noindex,nofollow" meta tag both prevent the PR that gets down to these pages from recirculating throughout the site. In the aggregate, that might be sending a lot of link juice into a black hole.