Redesign of an ecommerce site

[Jvalops]

I was just wondering how we should deal with filters and pagination with our ecommerce website.

We can do nofollow or noindex, follow or canonical for both filters and pagination.

Which one we should choose and why?

By the way we are trying to create more sub categories to avoid too many pages but we have 1,000s products and we still end up with a quite high amount of pages.

I've read a few conflicting seomoz QA about this issue.

Many Thanks

[RDK]

There are a few possible issues at play. The first thing you might do is look at your URL structure as you are navigating through your categories, products/SKUs.

1. If you are filtering and sorting without the URL structure changing, getting properly indexed will be your challenge.  Noindex vs.canonical is moot in this case.

2. If you are are filtering and sorting and the URL is changing with every parameter change, then you have to worry about duplicate content.  Robots.txt vs. canonical steps into the game and here's an example that I fell illustrates it best.  As you'll see, there are more ways than one and it will come down to which one is most easily done for your specific site while achieving the link structure that you desire.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

If you are using AJAX, a good xml sitemap is your lifeblood.

Good luck!