Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?
-
Hi
Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers
I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing.
Does anyone have any opinions on this?
I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome
-
I think I'd have to request these. I know it's something I need to look at, but I;m not sure how high a priority I should put on it.
Do you think it would make a huge difference if they were stopped from being crawled?
-
Hey Becky, I definitely question if they're being crawled at all. Do you have access to your server logs at all? If so, you could then use Screaming Frog's Log Analyser (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/log-file-analyser/) to parse through them and find if Googlebot is indeed hitting those pages. It would be worth the investigation!
-
I am confused as to whether they're even being crawled if Google ignores everything after the #
Perhaps they're being crawled but not indexed...
-
Thanks, I'll do that as a starting point
-
It's a really interesting question and I wonder if they are being crawled. The link destination on them in the right sidebar goes to /#, which shouldn't let the search engines crawl these links.
Are you seeing these parameters in Search Console or your log files? That is where I would look to see if they are actually being hit by Googlebot.
If they are, then you should remove that anchor link and let the checkboxes activate the facets. Not sure how easy this is to do technically, but it's the right way to do it.
-
Hi John,
Yeh I'm just trying to understand it all
Yes that's what I mean with the facet link you've shown.
I just want to ensure I'm not wasting Googlebot's time crawling facets which don't need to be crawled.
I'm not so worried about the duplicate pages as there's a canonical, but I don't think these facets are SEO friendly - I'm trying to work out how to make them SEO friendly
-
Hey Becky, I see you posting a bunch about your technical SEO and internal linking/indexation discoveries. Great to see that you're digging in deep!
When you say a "facet", do you mean a link like this - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/multipurpose-storage-lockers#facet:-70000000000000105744949554832109109&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:5&pageView:grid& ?
If that's the case, that page has a canonical on it back to the base of http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/multipurpose-storage-lockers, but you should take a look in your server logs (this is a good place to start - https://builtvisible.com/log-file-analysis/) to see if these are being hit by Googlebot.
Just trying to figure out what you're asking so I can try to help!
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
-
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
Is it a problem that Google's index shows paginated page urls, even with canonical tags in place?
Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
Hi, we are a South African insurance company. We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance. Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely. This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes". The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery. The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car". Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | miway0 -
Where's all the text?
Hi, We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in). Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java? Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
What's the news on sitwide nofollow links and anchor text penalties
Is it possible to be penalized for sitewide nofollow links because of anchor text penalties, even if you use branded anchor text?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How do you find old linking url's that contain uppercase letters?
We have recently moved our back office systems, on the old system we had the ability to use upper and lower case letters int he url's. On the new system we can only use lower case, which we are happy with. However any old url's being used from external sites to link into us that still have uppercase letterign now hit the 404 error page. So, how do we find them and any solutions? Example: http://www.christopherward.co.uk/men.html - works http://www.christopherward.co.uk/Men.html - Fails Kind regards Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Duncan_Moss0 -
Could a HTML <select>with large numbers of <option value="<url>">'s affect my organic rankings</option></select>
Hi there, I'm currently redesigning my website, and one particular pages lists hotels in New York. Some functionality I'm thinking of adding in is to let the user find hotels close to specific concert venues in New York. My current thinking is to provide the following select element on the page - selecting any one of the options will automatically redirect to my page for that concert venue. The purpose of this isn't to affect the organic traffic - I'm simply introducing this as a tool to help customers find the right hotel, but I certainly don't want it to have an adverse effect on my organic traffic. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. I must add that in certain cities, such as New York, there could be up to 450 different options in this select element. | <select onchange="location=options[selectedIndex].value;"> <option value="">Show convenient hotels for:</option> <option value="http://url1..">1492 New York</option> <option value="http://url2..">Abrons Arts Center</option> <option value="http://url3..">Ace of Clubs New York</option> <option value="http://url4..">Affairs Afloat</option> <option value="http://url5..">Affirmation Arts New York</option> <option value="http://url6..">Al Hirschfeld Theatre</option> <option value="http://url7..">Alice Tully Hall</option> .. .. ..</select> Many thanks Mike |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!9