We have our own internal search results pages for our download section.
These results are currently crawlable but with NOINDEX meta tags so they don't appear in the search index.
People link to these results - but we have 10s of thousands of pages of these results, possibly eating up lots of crawl budget.
What should we do - should we disallow indexing using robots.txt to these pages or should we continue with the META NOINDEX (follow) so people linking to these search result pages still pass their "link juice"?
Google states (in their webmaster guidelines): "Use the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages."
Any advice, suggestions or opinions are greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.