Thank you for your response Peter. I have been thinking of an alternative and this is what I have come up with:

1. We no index, follow all our attribute filters

2. We slowly add landing pages using filter combinations manually one at a time, with good content and build their PA over time.

3. These new pages would contain **index, follow **tags and would also be listed on our site map.xml file

This way we wont have numerous automated landing pages, rather few targeted landing pages with links and content.

Your opinion on this approach would be much appreciated

What do you think about adding noindex, no follow to all the layered navigation filters and slowly adding one landing page at a time with good content and building their Page authority. Since filters will be noindex, no follow, these landing pages can be submitted to good through the xml sitemap. Would this be a better strategy in your opinion?

How would you handle this if it were your project?

Don't participate in blog commenting for the purpose of link building. If you genuinly find something really interesting and want to leave a comment, fair enough.

You want to build links? Start a blog, a damn good one. You're in the photography business, so you must have knowledge on the subject? write some amazing content that others would want to read and share. Optimise this content (naturally) to get it ranking in search engines.

Good luck

Thank you for your valuable input guys. This is really helping me to clarify some concepts. I would like to refer to the real life case that this discussion is about

Our strategy is to use our layered navigation filters to create numerous landing pages. As you can imagine, a combination of these filters can create many many pages. We are using the following tactics to make them search engine friendly:

1. Using nofollow, noindex tags in the header, if more than one option is selected for the same filter, to control crawl depth

2. Using nofollow, noindex tags in the header, if more than two different filters are selected, to control crawl depth.

3. Adding unique content to these pages

4. Creating a unique meta title/description for each page

5. Using rel next prev for pagination, to consolidate link equity and preferably index the first page in the series

As you can imagine, even with the condition of nofollow, noindex pages with more than two filter combinations, we get many many pages. After reading your comments, I am wondering whether this strategy will work for us, especially since we are a new site with 25 DA. Do you think this strategy will work for us? Do you suggest an alternative?

We are using our layered navigation in Magento to create landing pages. These landing pages contain filtered products with unique content. I was wondering if having many pages can cause dilution in domain authority?

Hello Mozzers!

Say there is a website with 100 pages and a domain authority of 25. If the number of pages on this website increases to 10,000 can that decrease its domain authority or affect it in any way?

Hi Lynn,

Thank you for your valuable input on the matter. Yes, using meta tags in the header. We are currently submitting filter pages that we want indexed through the site map, so google bot should be able to reach these pages. Also, we are displaying noindex, nofollow tags only on filter pages which have a combination of more than two filters selected as we do not need to go any deeper than that.

I understand your point of using noindex, follow instead of noindex, nofollow to prevent unexpected crawl issues. But on the contrary, don't you think we could conserve crawling bandwidth using noindex, nofollow tags on filter pages that serve no purpose being crawled and probably wont be externally linked to either?

We currently have around 7 filters, some with many values. This can create combinations of more than 500,000 filter pages...

Thanks

Howdy Mozzers!

We would like to use no follow, no index on our magento layered navigation pages after any two filters are selected. (We are using single filter pages as landing page, so we would liked them indexed)

Is it ok to use nofollow, noindex on these filter pages? Are there disadvantages of using nofollow on internal pages?

Matt mentioned refraining from using nofollow internally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8

But we would like to conserve crawling bandwidth and PR flow on potentially 100's of thousands of irrelevant/duplicate filter pages.

Ok, so we could canonical the first page in the pagination, that way any links to the pagination would flow juicy juice to the first page. That would make sense, since it would strengthen its ranking as a landing page as well.

I think ill implement the canonical and get rid of the content on pagination anyways, just avoid the problem completely.

Ace Marty!

Appreciate your response Marty.

What is your opinion on content for category pages. Currently we have the same content displaying on paginated pages for the same category (?p=1, ?p=2, etc)

Should we display content just on the first page and remove it for rest of the pagination or is this ok?

We are using rel="next/prev" but not sure if this is treated as duplication?

Great answers guys! I would personally also prefer 301's over canonicals. So the next questions is, to keep URLs with the trailing slash or without the trailing slash. I tend to lean towards without, since most URL's are indexed that way already, its easier on the eyes, and people tend to link that way.

Any preference?

Howdy Mozzers!

Our magento store URL's are accessible with or without a trailing slash at the end. Canonical's and 301 redirects are not set up for one of them at the moment.

Will this cause duplicate issue? Do we need to set canonical or 301 up? Which one is recommended?

MozAddict

I have seeon some trends for sites which do not even use XML sitemp and robots e.g. see this site. How do you see if sitemap is not used.

Also for classified websites, should ad pages be included in sitemap because after certain duration those ads will be deleted and google might not be able to crawl. What do you suggest about XML sitemap for classified website.