Multiple values for a single URL parameter - Is that possible?
-
I have a website which supports three languages - German, Spanish, Portuguese - by using language parameters.
How do I configure my URL parameters so that the only the Spanish and Portuguese URLs are crawled but not the German URLs. Basically, how do i specify two values for a single parameter.
-
I know you posted this a while ago, but I've just seen it.
The simplest way would be to generate your ROBOTS meta tag based on the parameter. I code in PHP so this is my example, but it will depend on your platform
Say your URL is domain.com?lang=es or ?lang=po or ?lang=de
$lang = $_GET['lang'];
if($lang=="de"){ echo ''; }
else{ echo ''; }
I left 'follow' in the German line because you may already have pages in the index, so this means Google DE has free reign over all your site, but any pages it finds should not be indexed.
If the site's not live yet, then you can change the 'follow' in the DE line to 'nofollow'.
Hope this helps.
-
I know you posted this a while ago, but I've just seen it.
The simplest way would be to generate your ROBOTS meta tag based on the parameter. I code in PHP so this is my example, but it will depend on your platform
Say your URL is domain.com?lang=es or ?lang=po or ?lang=de
$lang = $_GET['lang'];
if($lang=="de"){ echo ''; }
else{ echo ''; }
I left 'follow' in the German line because you may already have pages in the index, so this means Google DE has free reign over all your site, but any pages it finds should not be indexed.
If the site's not live yet, then you can change the 'follow' in the DE line to 'nofollow'.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Is it possible to deindex old URLs that contain duplicate content?
Our client is a recruitment agency and their website used to contain a substantial amount of duplicate content as many of the listed job descriptions were repeated and recycled. As a result, their rankings rarely progress beyond page 2 on Google. Although they have started using more unique content for each listing, it appears that old job listings pages are still indexed so our assumption is that Google is holding down the ranking due to the amount of duplicate content present (one software returned a score of 43% duplicate content across the website). Looking at other recruitment websites, it appears that they block the actual job listings via the robots.txt file. Would blocking the job listings page from being indexed either by robots.txt or by a noindex tag reduce the negative impact of the duplicate content, but also remove any link juice coming to those pages? In addition, expired job listing URLs stay live which is likely to be increasing the overall duplicate content. Would it be worth removing these pages and setting up 404s, given that any links to these pages would be lost? If these pages are removed, is it possible to permanently deindex these URLs? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ClickHub-Harry0 -
Blogging on multiple domains
We have three different domains for geotargeting (za,uk and .com). Each site at at the moment has the same content with only country specific details changed like currency etc. What is the best way to get maximum SEO benefit when posting new content.When we post new content should we repost to all three domains (the same content) or will Google only index the url on the domain which is crawled first. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Affiliate Link is Trumping Homepage - URL parameter handling?
An odd and slightly scary thing happened today: we saw an affiliate string version of our homepage ranking number one for our brand, along with the normal full set of site-links. We have done the following: 1. Added this to our robots.txt : User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | LawrenceNeal
Disallow: /*? 2. Reinserted a canonical on the homepage (we had removed this when we implemented hreflang as had read the two interfered with each other. We haven't had canonical for a long time now without issue. Is this anything to do with the algo update perhaps?! The third thing we're reviewing I'm slightly confused about: URL Parameter Handling in GWT. As advised - with regard to affiliate strings - to the question: "Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?" We have NO selected, which means they should be crawling one representative URL. But isn't it the case that we don't want them crawling or indexing ANY affiliate URLs? You can specify Googlebot to not crawl any of particular string, but only if you select: "Yes. The parameter changes the page content." Should they know an affiliate URL from the original and not index them? I read a quote from Matt Cutts which suggested this (along with putting a "nofollow" tag in affiliate links just in case) Any advice in this area would be appreciated. Thanks.0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Would you shorten this url, and if so how?
I designed the structure of my website way before I even thought about SEO. I run a website that requires me to categorize articles is somewhat deep nested categories so an example url would be as follows http://www.yakangler.com/articles/news/new-products/boats/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna Would you shorten the url to somethign like this? http://www.yakangler.com/a/n/np/b/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna If so how would you manage the redirects I'm unsure how to add a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file that wouldn't require me to add one for every single article. Could I do it with a rule that recognizes only the middle part of the url and redirect it accordingly? Thanks for any advice you might have!
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Registering a domain for multiple years
Does registering or renewing a domain name for more than a year improve search as a result of a more trusted site and company that will seem to be around for longer than just a year?
Technical SEO | | Motava0 -
Single Home Page Version
Hello, I'd like to redirect all versions of my homepage to www.inthelighturns.com so I force Google to see only one page. Is the below rewrites all I need? rewritecond %{http_host} ^inthelighturns.com [nc]rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.inthelighturns.com/$1 [r=301,nc] RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html) http://www.inthelighturns.com/ [R=301,L]RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html) http://www.inthelighturns.com/$1/ [R=301,L] Thanks Tyler
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0