Handling Similar page content on directory site

[cchhita]

Hi All,

SEOMOZ is telling me I have a lot of duplicate content on my site.  The pages are not duplicate, but very similar, because the site is a directory website with a page for cities in multiple states in the US.

I do not want these pages being indexed and was wanting to know the best way to go about this.

I was thinking I could do a rel ="nofollow" on all the links to those pages, but not sure if that is the correct way to do this.

Since the folders are deep within the site and not under one main folder, it would mean I would have to do a disallow for many folders if I did this through Robots.txt.

The other thing I am thinking of is doing a meta noindex, follow, but I would have to get my programmer to add a meta tag just for this section of the site.

Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this so I can eliminate these dup pages from my SEO report and from the search engine index?

Thanks!

[KaneJamison]

The best solution is to use  on those pages.

I believe that using robots.txt will still allow the URLs to be shown as URLs in search results, so that is less ideal. Not certain if that's still the case, but it used to be that way.

I personally would not nofollow links to that page, because if you use "noindex, follow" it will in turn pass value to other indexed pages, and nofollowing links to a noindex page isn't supposed to increase pagerank to other links on the page.

[cchhita]

Thanks Kane!

Meta-robots it is!

I will apply it and see how I go with it.

Cheers