Product search URLs with parameters and pagination issues - how should I deal with them?
-
Hello Mozzers - I am looking at a site that deals with URLs that generate parameters (sadly unavoidable in the case of this website, with the resource they have available - none for redevelopment) - they deal with the URLs that include parameters with *robots.txt - e.g. Disallow: /red-wines/? **
Beyond that, they userel=canonical on every PAGINATED parameter page[such as https://wine****.com/red-wines/?region=rhone&minprice=10&pIndex=2] in search results.**
I have never used this method on paginated "product results" pages - Surely this is the incorrect use of canonical because these parameter pages are not simply duplicates of the main /red-wines/ page? - perhaps they are using it in case the robots.txt directive isn't followed, as sometimes it isn't - to guard against the indexing of some of the parameter pages???
I note that Rand Fishkin has commented: "“a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL, because “you'll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren't worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).” **- yet I see this time again on ecommerce sites, on paginated result - any idea why? **
Now the way I'd deal with this is:
Meta robots tags on the parameter pages I don't want indexing (nofollow, noindex - this is not duplicate content so I would nofollow but perhaps I should follow?)
Use rel="next" and rel="prev" links on paginated pages - that should be enough.Look forward to feedback and thanks in advance, Luke
-
Hi Zack,
Have you configured your parameters in Search Console? Looks like you've got your prev/next tags nailed down, so there's not much else you need to do. It's evident to search engines that these types of dupes are not spammy in nature, so you're not running a risk of getting dinged.
-
Hi Logan,
I've seen your responses on several threads now on pagination and they are spot on so I wanted to ask you my question. We're an eCommerce site and we're using the rel=next and rel=prev tags to avoid duplicate content issues. We've gotten rid of a lot of duplicate issues in the past this way but we recently changed our site. We now have the option to view 60 or 180 items at a time on a landing page which is causing more duplicate content issues.
For example, when page 2 of the 180 item view is similar to page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Each view version has their own rel=next and prev tags. Wondering what we can do to get rid of this issue besides just getting rid of the 180 and 60 item view option.
https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2
https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4
Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks!
-
I've been having endless conversations about this over the last few days and in conclusion I agree with everything you say - thanks for your excellent advice. On this particular site next/prev was not set up correctly, so I'm working on that right now.
-
Yes I agree totally - some wise words of caution - thanks.
-
thanks for the feedback - it is Umbraco.
-
To touch on your question about if you should follow or nofollow links...if the pages in question could help with crawling in any fashion at all...despite being useless for their own sake, if they can be purposeful for the sake of other pages in terms of crawling and internal pagerank distribution, then I would "follow" them. Only if they are utterly useless for other pages too and are excessively found throughout a crawling of the site would I "nofollow" them. Ideally, these URLs wouldn't be found at all as they are diluting internal pagerank.
-
Luke,
Here's what I'd recommend doing:
- Lose the canonical tags, that's not the appropriate way to handle pagination
- Remove the disallow in the robots.txt file
- Add rel next/prev tags if you can; since parameter'd URLs are not separate pages, some CMSs are weird about adding tags to only certain versions of parameter
- Configure those parameters in Search Console ('the last item under the Crawl menu) - you can specific each parameter on the site and its purpose. You might find that some of these have already been established by Google, you can go in and edit those ones. You should configure your filtering parameters as well.
- You don't want to noindex these pages, for the same reason that you might not be able to add rel next/prev. You could risk that noindex tag applying to the root version of the URL instead of just the parameter version.
Google has gotten really good at identifying types of duplicate content due to things like paginated parameters, so they don't generally ding you for this kind of dupe.
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
-
May Faceted Navigation via ajax #parameter cause duplicated content issues?
We are going to implement a faceted navigation for an ecommerce site of about 1000 products.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Faceted navigation is implemented via ajax/javascript which adds to the URL a large number of #parameters.
Faceted pages are canonicalizing to page without any parameters. We do not want google to index any of the faceted pages at this point. Will google include pages with #parameters in their index?
Can I tell google somehow to ignore #parameters and not to index them?
Could this setup cause any SEO problems for us in terms of crawl bandwidth and or link equity?0 -
DeIndexing pagination
I have a custom made blog with boat loads of undesirable URLs in Google's index like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman
.com/resources?start=150
.com/resources?start=160
.com/resources?start=170 I've identified this is a source of duplicate title tags and had my programmer put a no index tag to automatically go on all of these undesirable URLs like this: However doing a site: search in google shows the URLs to still be indexed even though I've put the tag up a few weeks ago. How do I get google to remove these URLs from the index? I'm aware that the Search Console has an answer here https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598466?authuser=1&authuser=1&rd=1 but it says that blocking with meta tags should work. Do I just get google to crawl the URL again so it sees the tag and then deindexes the URLs? Or is there another way I'm missing.0 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
Howdy Mozzers I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me! ***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing Background The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change. Problem Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline. *They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Canada_wide_mediaOrganic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.
Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get. Redirects During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up: Original: http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume --301-- http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume --301-- http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume Canonical issue On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013. Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example). Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda) According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However - Sitemap We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?
That page is in the sitemap. Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z Change Frequency: Yearly Priority: 0.5
*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca What we looked at so far The redirects are all currently 301’s GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be. Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank. We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1). Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
1 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
How to determine URL Parameters in Google Webmaster
Hi there! I have a new website with so many duplicate meta titles and descriptions because of its expanded features from the e-commerce shopping cart that I am using like mobile website, product sorting, etc. Aside from canonical, is it advisable to use the URL parameters from Google webmaster tools to disallow crawling of mobile website and other parameters like, "parent", "catalogsetview", "pcsid", "pg" "mode". I appreciate and advise. 🙂 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paumer800 -
Long URL with QueryStrings
Hi, I have a search page that generates some querystrings (with the term, current page, number of pages etc). This long url is something bad for Google indexing? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GDB0 -
Issues in Migrating to CMS
My number one client is migrating a formerly HTML/Dreamweaver site to an open source CMS (CMS Made Simple.) We have execellent rankings right now, and I am concerned about what we will lose, and how to ensure the rankings stay. Any guidance? I have already asked the developer to maintain the page names and structure, and tag the CMS output pages.htm . I've run a few weak spiders over the staged CMS site, and all the pages are being picked up. What else can I do, we are getting ready to launch. THANKS!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayt0