No Follow & Rel Canon for Product Filters

[Remke]

Our site uses Canonicals to address duplicate content issues with product/facet filtering.

example: www.mysite.com/product?color=blue

Relcanon= www.mysite.com/product

However, our site is also using no follow for all of the "filters" on a page (so all ?color=, etc. links are no follow). What is the benefit of utilizing the no follow on the filters if we have the rel canon in place?

Is this an effort to save crawl budget? Are we giving up possible SEO juice by having the no follow and not having the crawler get to the canonical tag and subsequently reference the main page?

Is this just something we just forget about? I hope we're not giving up SEO juice by

[Chris.Menke]

"site is also using no follow for all of the "filters" on a page (so all ?color=, etc. links are no follow)."

For clarification, do you mean  you're using nofollows on links pointing to "?color=" pages or links on/from "?color=" pages?

[Remke]

Hi, Chris

Yes, we are using no follow on the links pointing to "?color=" pages. The pages themselves are using rel canon pointing back to the main URL without the "?color=".

[Chris.Menke]

Maybe there were external links pointing filter pages, so having a canonical tags on them pushed the juice to the canonical page?  Have you looked to  see if you have backlinks pointing to those pages? Even if there currently are not, it seems it could happen. So, I'd say it's better to keep both.

[Remke]

Thanks, Chris.

We should have no external links pointing to the URLs with the additional product parameters.

Are we losing any SEO juice for our internal pages, with the internal links with the additional parameters attached being no follow.

For example.

For this page: https://www.remke.com/aluminum-strain-relief-cord-grips/

All of the internal links to the "filtered" products/options are marked no follow. ex: https://www.remke.com/aluminum-strain-relief-cord-grips/?cordgriptype=45%20Degree (no follow when linked from the facet filtering on the lefthand side of the site).

But the page itself: https://www.remke.com/aluminum-strain-relief-cord-grips/?cordgriptype=45%20Degree has a canonical pointing back to https://www.remke.com/aluminum-strain-relief-cord-grips/.

Are we losing any SEO juice from the internal traffic utilizing the filters or is it a moot point and we should just leave it how it is?

Thanks again for the help.