Canonical vs noindex for blog tags

[nicole.healthline]

Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience.

Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?

[NakulGoyal]

If you do a noindex,follow meta tag, that'll essentially do the same thing as canonicalizing them as far as the effect in the SERPS is concerned. These tag pages will be deindexed.

The noindex tag will just de-index them.

The canonical tag will de-index them as well, but will work more like a 301 redirect for the search engines. So if you think you have link juice to these tag pages that you'd like to redirect to a category page, you can canonicalize them other noindex,follow is fine.

The pages will still work as is in either case.