Should i noindex/nofollow a faceted navigation page?

[SEOhmygod]

I have an ecommerce website with 4 departments, that share the same categories,

For example a bicycle shop would have different products for mountain biking and road cycling, but they would both share the same 'tyres' category.

I get around this by having the department as a filter, that changes the products on show, and adds a URL parameter of ?department=1.

When this filter is applied, i have a canonical link setup to the non-filtered category. Any filter links are nofollowed.

My top menu has 4 different sections, one for each department, and links to these URLs with the department parameter already on, these links are set to allow robots to follow.

As i am actively pointing Google at these pages, and it is my main navigation, should the page they go to be noindexed? As its the canonical i want to rank.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Cheers

[Everett]

Hello SEOhmygod,

If you could share your site I would be able to provide better input. From the sound of it though, if I understand correctly, you are canonicalizing each department back to a version of the page for all departments. That is probably not ideal. It would be better to have each department have its own landing page for each category, on which you would customize Title, description and OnPage content for that particular department. You may also want to consider rewriting the URL instead of using a filter so:

.com/tyres?department=1

becomes

.com/tyres/mountain-biking/

or

.com/mountain-biking/tyres