Use of rel=canonical to view all page & No follow links

[Ypsilon]

Hey,

I have a couple of questions regarding e-commerce category pages and filtering options:

1. I would like to implement the rel=canonical to the view all page as suggested on this article on googlewebmastercentral. If you go on one of my category pages you will see that both the "next page link" and the "view all" links are nofollowed. Is that a mistake? How does nofoolow combines with canonical view all?

2. Is it a good thing to nofollow the "sorty by" pages or should I also use Noindex for them?

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

The nofollow and the canonical tag can exist quite happily together: if you are using the canonical tag as suggested, the nofollowing of the "next" links definitely strikes me as more of a safe-guard than anything else. The canonical tag should do the job just fine - there is also no guarantee that Google won't find those pages elsewhere, making the nofollow tag obsolete.

Again, the "sort by" pages' links can be nofollowed, but nofollowing links to them doesn't mean that Google will never find them. For instance, someone could link to them on Twitter, in a blog post, etc. Noindex, or a canonical if they are largely identical, should suffice.

Cheers,

Jane