Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow robots

[DROIDSTERS]

Hi Mozzers

I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it.

So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes,

I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*.

So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs)

If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt

Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow?

PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to.

PSS: another reason why this needs looking at is because search engines won't be able to make an interpretation of these pages (until they have been cleaned up and fleshed out with unique content) which could result in bad ranking of the pages which could conclude to my users not being satisfied, so over and above the SEO factor, usability of the site is being looked at here as well, I don't want my users to land on these pages atm. If they navigate to it via the filters then awesome because they are defining what they are looking for with the filters.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Chris Captivate.

[irvingw]

You said  "If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a command like your robots.txt"

This used to be an issue, but now nofollowing a link throws away the PR. It used to be that if you had 4 links on a page an nofollowed 2 of them all the PR gets pushed to the 2 links. Now if you nofollow two links, the PR still is divided by 4 and you're throwing away half of your PR. So Google could care less now what you are nofollowing internally.

Nofollowing links to your pages is not enough to keep your pages from getting indexed, you need the noindex, follow meta tag on the page. Even robots.txt disallow sometimes isn't enough because Google could come in from a deep link and index the page.

Why aren't you using URL parameter handling in WMT to tell Google to not index pages with the ?filter parameter in the URLs?