Is a Rel Canonical Sufficient or Should I 'NoIndex'

[keL.A.xT.o]

Hey everyone,

I know there is literature about this, but I'm always frustrated by technical questions and prefer a direct answer or opinion. Right now, we've got recanonicals set up to deal with parameters caused by filters on our ticketing site. An example is that this:

http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets?location=il&time=day relcanonicals to...

http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets

My question is if this is good enough to deal with the duplicate content, or if it should be de-indexed. Assuming so, is the best way to do this by using the Robots.txt? Or do you have to individually 'noindex' these pages?

This site has 650k indexed pages and I'm thinking that the majority of these are caused by url parameters, and while they're all canonicaled to the proper place, I am thinking that it would be best to have these de-indexed to clean things up a bit.

Thanks for any input.

[MoosaHemani]

I believe if you have setup the rel canonical correctly there ideally should be no issue with that but if you really see some of your non preferred versions indexed in Google then you can go with the no index idea.

When no-indexing pages you can go with any approach but in my experience it is better do it by using robots.txt.

I hope this is a direct and to the point opinion J

[EGOL]

There are a few choices for managing parameters.  I have used....

A)  The URL parameter manager in the "crawl" options of Google Webmaster Tools.  I have found it to be totally unreliable.

B)  Rel=canonical.  It is much more reliable than WMT but you still must rely on search engines to discover it and obey - which can be slow to take effect and is less than 100% effective.

I have not used robots.txt because I think that it would have similar performance to rel=canonical.

I have the belief that you shoud not trust search engines to do things for you that you can do for yourself with 100% reliability.  So, I am doing ......

C). Managing parameters on my server with .htaccess so I have 100% control.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi - Just to throw in my two cents - the canonicals should do it as Moosa says but if you really want to de-index then a dynamic meta robots tag is the best way to get them out of the index in my experience.

That being said, having a quick look at your site it doesn't look like those url parameters are the issue, a quick look at something like this: site:charged.fm inurl:date= only shows a few thousand results and the location= and time= show even less - so looks like the rel canonicals are doing the job and will continue to with a bit of patience. If you look at urls with /event/ in them however you see a lot (300,000+) and I am guessing many of those are for past events. Google webmaster tools should help you id what the bulk of those 600 thousand urls are so worth verifying where the exact issue is before attempting to fix something that isn't a problem...

[LesleyPaone]

I totally agree with EGOL on this. I would like to add my 2cents since I think I am one of the only SEO people that is a developer too.

This is what I would do (in pseudo code) put a <rel="canonical"  href="$url=strtok($_SERVER[" request_uri"],'?');"=""> </rel="canonical">

This is in php, I don't know what platform you are on, but what it will do in php is return the current url as the canonical and delete the ? and everything after. So basically it will return the url minus the query string. I use this technique a lot with my clients for doing canonical urls on CMS's that use query strings and it works great.