Reducing Booking Engine Indexation

[Leverage_Marketing]

Hi Mozzers,

I am working on a site with a very useful room booking engine.  Helpful as it may be, all the variations (2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, room with a view, etc, etc,) are indexed by Google.  Section 13 on Search Pagination in Dr. Pete's great post on Panda http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world speaks to our issue, but I was wondering since 2 (!) years have gone by, if there are any additional solutions y'all might recommend.  We want to cut down on the duplicate titles and content and get the useful but not useful for SERPs online booking pages out of the index.  Any thoughts?

Thanks for your help.

[smarties954]

1. You could use rel=nofollow on links pointing to pages variations.

2. If you can you could also dynamically  add a meta noindex, no follow, when a variant of the initial page is generated.

3. You could also add a link rel=canonical pointing to the initial page, this will tell bots that this page is the original page.

In other word, you have to tell crawlers when it is a page variant and that you don't want him to index them.

[Everett]

I love public Q&A because everyone gets to chip in, but nobody wants to share the domain in question (which is understandable) so that makes the job of answering a question really difficult.

Can you hide the actual domain name but provide some examples of URLs? For instance:

ourdomain.com/honolulu/four-seasons?rooms=4&view=0&page=1

Did you try any of Dr. Pete's suggestions? If not, I would implement one of those first, as they are still as relevant today as they were when he wrote them. Rel next/prev has received a bit more attention since then, but it only solves part of the problem if you're dealing with parameters beyond simple pagination (e.g. rooms, views, etc..).

From the information provided above I would probably go with a rel canonical tag to fix this issue.

I would not rely on a rel nofollow tag on links pointing to variants, as was suggested by Smarties, because Google is going to find those URLs regardless and a no follow tag on a link doesn't tell them not to index it.

Smarties #2 suggestion sounds good but I'd allow them to be followed. i.e. robots meta noindex,follow as opposed to noindex,nofollow. This allows pagerank from external links to flow through non-indexable URLs.

Good luck!