Removing existing filtered pages from Google's index: noindex / 301 / canonical to non-filtered page?
- by Noam
I've decided to remove some of my site's pages from the Google index to focus more of the indexed pages on higher quality pages. The pages I'm going to remove are already in the index. These removed pages are filtered pages which will continue to exist, I just don't want them in the google index because they add little quality to the same page without any filter selected. I've added in webmaster tools specification of narrow for the parameters that set these filters, but it doesn't seem this changes anything in how he handles these pages.
So I'm considering three options:
Adding <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> to the html header of these filtered pages
301 to the non-filtered page that contains the most similar information and will remain in the index
Canonical tag. Which I'm not sure is exactly the mainstream use case, as these aren't really the same pages.
Which should I use?
