Should i noindex/nofollow a faceted navigation page?
-
I have an ecommerce website with 4 departments, that share the same categories,
For example a bicycle shop would have different products for mountain biking and road cycling, but they would both share the same 'tyres' category.
I get around this by having the department as a filter, that changes the products on show, and adds a URL parameter of ?department=1.
When this filter is applied, i have a canonical link setup to the non-filtered category. Any filter links are nofollowed.
My top menu has 4 different sections, one for each department, and links to these URLs with the department parameter already on, these links are set to allow robots to follow.
As i am actively pointing Google at these pages, and it is my main navigation, should the page they go to be noindexed? As its the canonical i want to rank.
Hopefully this makes sense.
Cheers
-
Hello SEOhmygod,
If you could share your site I would be able to provide better input. From the sound of it though, if I understand correctly, you are canonicalizing each department back to a version of the page for all departments. That is probably not ideal. It would be better to have each department have its own landing page for each category, on which you would customize Title, description and OnPage content for that particular department. You may also want to consider rewriting the URL instead of using a filter so:
.com/tyres?department=1
becomes
.com/tyres/mountain-biking/
or
.com/mountain-biking/tyres
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
-
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Wrong Page Ranking?!?
I did some research today, one of our keywords is "mobile column lifts." I recently redid a page on our website to target this keyword. When I Google search this keyword I see that a page on our site titled "Reconditioned Mobile Lifts" is ranking for this keyword. I took a look with Moz, our mobile column lifts page ranks 90 for the keyword, and the reconditioned lifts page ranks 73 the keyword. Why is this happening? How can I fix this? https://www.slec.com/mobile-column-lifts/ https://www.slec.com/reconditioned-mobile-lifts/
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page
Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.
Technical SEO | | Nanook10 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
How to handle outdated products/pages?
Hi, I wonder how I should handle pages with outdated products. Our market is changing rapidly unfortunately so products we offered in the past are no longer existent. So for example one of our product was called "PRODUCT 1" The URL for this product is still:
Technical SEO | | bastelele
www.mydomain.com/product-1/ with different subpages about the product like:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/about/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/howto/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/pricing/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/whatever/ Our new product is totally different from the first one. Is it still a good idea to set up 301 redirects or are there any other ideas? Thanks in advance
Bastian0 -
Noindex, follow duplicate pages
I have a series of websites that all feature a library of the same content. These pages don't make up the majority of the sites content, maybe 10-15% of the total pages. Most of our clients won't take the time to rewrite the content, but it's valuable to their site. So I decided to noindex, follow all of the pages. Outside of convincing them all to write their own versions of the content, is this the best method? I could also block the pages with robots.txt, but then I couldn't pass any link juice through the pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | vforvinnie0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Pages plummeting in ranking
Hi all, I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions. One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site. Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50. We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs. Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0