Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?
-
I just got a Mozcrawl back and see lots of errors for overly dynamic urls. The site is a villa rental site that gives users the ability to search by bedroom, amenities, price, etc, so I'm wondering what the best way to keep these types of dynamically generated pages with urls like /property-search-page/?location=any&status=any&type=any&bedrooms=9&bathrooms=any&min-price=any&max-price=any from indexing.
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated : )
-
If you have a page that lists all the villas outside the search results, then you don't lose anything by blocking that folder on the robots.txt
But still, somebody, the guy that wrote the custom theme knows how to do the changes needed.
If you want I can help you with it, for free
Just PM me (I'll need FTP access).
-
Having some trouble... Because the site is Wordpress, which dynamically generates pages, there is no /property-search-page/ nor is there a property-search-page.php in the editor files, so the only option I have is to put disallow: /property-search-page/ in the robots.txt file, correct?
-
You guys rock! I'll try these out tomorrow. Thanks a million.
-
If you have a /all-villas/ page then you should go ahead and noindex the search results as Google Guidelines suggests. You can either do it in the /property-search-page/ or using the robots.txt file.
In the robots.txt, add:
disallow: /property-search-page/
The robots method guarantees that no page inside that folder is indexed or even crawled (including /property-search-page/?whatever).
Or on the page /property-search-page/ you can add the meta noindex as such:
Then check if that meta tag is shown in all search results (just check a couple of them).
Hope that works!
-
Yes, it will. Also looks like custom code, it depends on how the header is coded. But it should work. Test it, if you can. This should solve your problems relatively easily. If nothing works, you can always do a robots.txt deny for /property-search-page/?* pages, but that's not a recommended solution. Try the canonical way to see if it works first.
-
We already have Yoast installed, but the errors are still showing up in the Moz report.
To clarify, let's assume we have another page that lists all the villas (/all-villas/). If I go to the property-search-page php file and canonical=rel it to /all-villas/, will it canonical=rel all /property-search-page/?whatever pages to the /all-villas/ page?
-
Well, that will make a little easier from one side and harder from the other.
You can try installing SEO by Yoast, that will put all the canonical tags for you, however, I think it won't link the search result pages to the canonical page that lists them all.
That might require a little coding.
If there's another page, outside /property-search-page/ folder that lists all villas, then you can disallow that folder in the robots.txt file, and that should fix it. If there isn't, well, then you will need to edit the /property-search-page/ page to use a static canonical tag that points to the page that lists all the villas removing any kind of filtering.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
I agree with Federico one hundred percent. Figure out what your primary SEO friendly URLs are for these kinds of pages and canonical them back to that page.
-
I wouldn't put a noindex meta on them, instead I would consider using a canonical tag pointing to the page that lists all the villas.
Anyway, what programming language are you using?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Good to use disallow or noindex for these?
Hello everyone, I am reaching out to seek your expert advice on a few technical SEO aspects related to my website. I highly value your expertise in this field and would greatly appreciate your insights.
Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
Below are the specific areas I would like to discuss: a. Double and Triple filter pages: I have identified certain URLs on my website that have a canonical tag pointing to the main /quick-ship page. These URLs are as follows: https://www.interiorsecrets.com.au/collections/lounge-chairs/quick-ship+black
https://www.interiorsecrets.com.au/collections/lounge-chairs/quick-ship+black+fabric Considering the need to optimize my crawl budget, I would like to seek your advice on whether it would be advisable to disallow or noindex these pages. My understanding is that by disallowing or noindexing these URLs, search engines can avoid wasting resources on crawling and indexing duplicate or filtered content. I would greatly appreciate your guidance on this matter. b. Page URLs with parameters: I have noticed that some of my page URLs include parameters such as ?variant and ?limit. Although these URLs already have canonical tags in place, I would like to understand whether it is still recommended to disallow or noindex them to further conserve crawl budget. My understanding is that by doing so, search engines can prevent the unnecessary expenditure of resources on indexing redundant variations of the same content. I would be grateful for your expert opinion on this matter. Additionally, I would be delighted if you could provide any suggestions regarding internal linking strategies tailored to my website's structure and content. Any insights or recommendations you can offer would be highly valuable to me. Thank you in advance for your time and expertise in addressing these concerns. I genuinely appreciate your assistance. If you require any further information or clarification, please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you. Cheers!0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
Hi, We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain: www.example.com --> English version de.example.com --> German version Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a: www.example.com/de www.example.com/es Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Best URL-structure for ecommerce store?
What structure will recommend to the product pages? Lets make an example with the keyword "Luxim FZ200" With category in url:
Technical SEO | | gojesper
www.myelectronicshop.com/digital-cameras/luxim-FZ200.html With /product prefix:
www.myelectronicshop.com/product/luxim-FZ200.html Without category in url:
www.myelectronicshop.com/luxim-FZ200.html I have read in a blog post that Paddy Moogan recommend /lluxim-FZ200.html - i think i prefer this version too. But I can see that many of the bigger ecommerce stores are using a /product prefix before the product name. What is the reason for this? and what is best practice?0 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
Best Dynamic Sitemap Generator
Hello Mozers, Could you please share the best Dynamic Sitemap Generator you are using. I have found this place: http://www.seotools.kreationstudio.com/xml-sitemap-generator/free_dynamic_xml_sitemap_generator.php Thanks in advanced for your help.
Technical SEO | | SEOPractices0