Experiences with NOINDEX, FOLLOW on sort/pagination pages?

[brandon0401]

Hey guys - have a question on everyones experience doing NOINDEX, FOLLOW on their sort or pagination pages.

IE

[url]www.domain.com/category/sport/sort-PopularToday[/url]

and

[url]www.domain.com/category/sport/page-2[/url]

and

[url]www.domain.com/category/sport/sort-PopularToday/page-2[/url]

for examples - the main page would be [url]www.domain.com/category/sport[/url]

I am thinking about doing a NOINDEX, FOLLOW tag on all these pages - I do link to these pages from top and bottom of these category pages, but think it might be best just to index the main category pages to push more juice to them.

On these sort pages I do have unique title/h1/meta tags - which are Page 1 - Sport.......or Most Popular Sport, etc.

What does everyone think or have experienced in doing this?

Thanks a ton!

[brandon0401]

bump

[mark_roach]

This seems like a sensible idea.

I have done something similar on my site. However I do not watch my rankings closely enough to know if it has made any noticeable difference.

If the only significant difference between the pages is the title then those pages may already be flagged up as duplicates. I have always believed that removing the near duplicate pages would strengthen those pages remaining in the index.

What percentage of your currently indexed pages would remain indexable if you were to implement the change as you have suggested ?

I am currently pondering NOINDEXing 90% of my low value pages in order to give more focus to the remaining pages, is this likely to trip any filters ?

[caveman]

Keep in mind that META noindex won't stop those pages from acrruing PageRank/link equity. It just means that those pages will not be shown in the engines' indexes.

If you're trying to prevent PR from flowing out of a page that is noindex-ed, you will need to also use META nofollow.

Another alternative is to block engines from crawling the pages, using robots.txt disallows. Disallowed pages will still be indexed, but they won't be crawled and links inside those disallowed pages won't be followed.

[brandon0401]

see - right now im noindex, follow - because I want the links within the pageination/sort to get followed/indexed....good?

[caveman]

Yep.

[don_dr]

Don't know if this would help much, but i came across a discussion 3 days ago talking about the noindex, nofollow attributes of a page. The inputs in that discussions did NOT to allay my fears => Googlebot "still" follows links on a page with "nofollow" in the robots meta tags.

I personally noticed this through a small experiment of mine. I placed a link to one of my sites on a page on another with noindex, nofollow. I checked using Google's webmasters' tools and still found a link to my site from that page.

I completely agree that the best way to stop an SE from indexing or following links and pages altogether is to use the robots.txt