Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.

[bfinternet]

Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products.

The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content.

Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages.

I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?

[RyanPurkey]

If the filters are working via parameters you can go into GWT and add them to the exclusion list.  Robots.txt might be able to apply if you were able to serve filters via a folder through a bit of URL rewriting.  Mostly it's a question of getting Google to ignore the duplicate content so research specific to your clients situation there will be a good start.