How to block "print" pages from indexing

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, but I have to jump in - do NOT use all of those signals simultaneously. You'll make a mess, and they'll interfere with each other. You can try Robots.txt or NOINDEX on the page level - my experience suggests NOINDEX is much more effective.

Also, do not nofollow the links yet - you'll block the crawl, and then the page-level cues (like NOINDEX) won't work. You can nofollow later. This is a common mistake and it will keep your fixes from working.

[dreadmichael]

Thanks Jennifer, will do! So much good information.

[NakulGoyal]

Donnie, I agree. However, we had the same problem on a website and here's what we did the canonical tag:

Over a period of 3-4 weeks, all those print pages disappeared from the SERP. Now if I take a print URL and do a cache: for that page, it shows me the web version of that page.

So yes, I agree the question was about blocking the pages from getting indexed. There's no real recipe here, it's about getting the right solution. Before canonical tag, robots.txt was the only solution. But now with canonical there (provided one has the time and resources available to implement it vs adding one line of text to robots.txt), you can technically 301 the pages and not have to stop/restrict the spiders from crawling them.

Absolutely no offence to your solution in any way. Both are indeed workable solutions. The best part is that your robots.txt solution takes 30 seconds to implement since you provided the actually disallow code :), so it's better.