Best Practice to conserve PR

[FranticFish]

A site I'm working on (where I don't have dev control) has a number of generic 'enquiry' pages about its widgets. The links go like this:

enquire.php?widget=123&type=enquiry-type

I'm thinking there are various ways to deal with this that are at my disposal, given that I can't get the site recoded to hide these links altogether:

1) rel=nofollow the links
2) noindex,nofollow the enquiry pages

Both of these to my mind do the same thing - create a dead end for PR.
So then there's:

3) noindex,follow the enquiry page and insert a link back into the site. Google sees loads of pages, flows link benefit back into the site.

or

4) use a canonical tag and insert a link back into the site. Google sees one page and flows link benefit back into the site.

What do people think about these approaches? Any other ideas?

[tedster]

Both approaches sound good to me - I'd probably go with noindex,follow

[FranticFish]

Thanks Ted. Related to this I have another question.

If you use rel=canonical to 'amalgamate' pages, I take it this means that the main page accumulates all the PR from the secondary pages?

(I'm getting this from Google's wording on the original announcement that said this "helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version")

[tedster]

That's the assumption most people are making - based on Google's description that they will treat the canonical link a lot like a 301 redirect. I haven't heard of anyone testing this - PR flow is pretty hard to test in a rigorous way.

There is one problem I see with a canonical link tag in your situation. Suppose someone has linked to a specific enquiry page and now it actually ranks somewhere for some related query. If you use a canonical link, then that ranking will go away and the searcher will be sent to whatever URL you've listed as the canonical. It sounds like there really IS no other URL that is canonical in this case.

If you use noindex,follow, then the above scenario still could result in a URL-only ranking, or a ranking where the title and snippet are generated based on backlink anchor text.

[deadsea]

Another possible solution: make sure that enquire.php (no query string) returns a page with a good keyword and some external links. Using google webmaster tools, tell googlebot to ignore the "widget" and "type" parameters. In an ideal world, Google would then see all links into enquire.php as not having a query string and that page could be competitive at ranking for something and for distributing a large amount of pagerank to other important pages.

[FranticFish]

Links to the enquiry pages (except from internally) are going to be non-existent. This is a a generic (popup) page that handles a number of functions within the site from hundreds of different pages.

I was pretty much decided on the 'noindex,follow' solution before, and I think that's what I'll go with.

Thanks guys.