Magento Layered Navigation & Duplicate Content
-
Hello Dear SeoMoz,
I would like to ask your help with something that I am not sure off. Our ecommerce web site is built with Magento. I have found many problems so far and I know that there will be many more in the future. Currently, I am trying to find the best way to deal with the duplicate content that is produced from the layered navigation (size, gender etc). I have done a lot of research so far in order to understand which might be the best practice and I found the following practices:
- **Block layered navigation URLSs from the Google Webmaster Tools (**Apparently this works for Google Only).
- Block these URLs with the robots.txt file
- Make links no-follow
- **Make links JavaScript from Magento ***
- Avoid including these links in the xml site map.
- Avoid including these link in the A-Z Product Index.
- Canonical tag
- Meta Tags (noindex, nofollow)
Question
If I turn the layered navigation links into JavaScript links from the Magento Admin, the layered navigation links are still found by the crawlers but they look like that:
|
instead of:
http://www.mysite.com/girls-basics.html?gender_filte...
|
Can these new URLS (http://www.mysite.com/# ) solve the duplicate content problems with the layered navigation or do I need to implement other practices too to make sure that everything is done right.
Kind Regards
Stefanos Anastasiadis
-
I'm not sure if you guys found a solution to this but I've used Mageworx with my Magento sites and it seems to handle everything I need. I do have to do some Mod-rewrites but nothing too much for a developer to handle.
-
From what I can gather about Magento is the Layered Nav can create seemingly endless URL's. Even if you were to use one of the modules created to make them 'friendly', you would still technically have reems of duplicate pages...right? All nicely re-written but effectively with the same titles and meta...
You may be able to put a wildcard disallow in the robots file for the parameter 'dir=' , which is associated with all the filters. I dont know how well this will work or if Google may on occasision ignore this or find a way into the layered pages anyway? Does anyone know? What if the spider entered the site through a direct link to filtered page...would the robots.txt file go by the way side in this instance?
You could in theory also use WMT to dictate that Google does not index pages with the 'dir=' parameter. Again, I am not sure as to the success rate using this.
Its one of those areas that has many open and unaswered discussions but nothing definitive anywhere to address the issue. Yet Magento is very popular and as you look at people sites who use it you can see they have some how found a way to sort this out. Id love to be a fly on the wall in their office!
-
Stefanos:
Hi! Did you ever find an answer to this question? I have a Magento install as well and need some advanced technical SEO. Are you working with a Magento consultant at all?
Thanks!
Lynn
-
Thanks a lot for your reply. I already know this extension but it is not what I am looking for.
-
I don't know if you stumble upon this Extension,
but it may resolve your problems.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/EcommerceTeam/extension/4420/layered_navigation_seo
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
-
How to deal with this duplicate content
Hello our websites offers prayer times in the US and UK. The problem is that we have nearby towns where the prayer times are the same and the pages (exp : https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-michigan-12258-en and https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-12147-en) are in duplicate . Same issue for this page https://prayer-time.uk/prayer-times-wallsend-411-en How can we solve this problem
On-Page Optimization | | Zakirou0 -
Content in Tabs
I speed read an article recently and forgot to save it regarding Contents on a page in tabs. Is it correct that now Google is rendering the entire page it's better not to have content in tabs hidden by Javascript? As it stands at the moment, we've got the tabs set-up so that the main part of the page containing the keyword rich text is in a tab and not the first thing presented to the user
On-Page Optimization | | Ham19790 -
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Forum
Hi Everyone, I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz. My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)? I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin. Thank you, Kris
On-Page Optimization | | shapefit0 -
Your thoughts on page navigation
Hi again SEOmoz community. What are your thoughts on mainpage navigation. How it should be handled? Scenario 1. - links to the main sections with a mouse rollover feature where it shows subsections of the main sections Scenario 2. - links to the main sections, but the subsections are hidden and only visible on the click Scenario 3. links to the main sections and subsections allways visible I would like to hear you oppinions on this. What did you find as the best featrue, or did you try to find someting new entirely. What do you think would be the best scenario SEO wise and in the light of keeping links on page in decent numbers 🙂 Imo, Scenario 2 is the option to go with. Tnx in advance for all your replys. Sincerely, sinisa
On-Page Optimization | | TataSinke0 -
Copyscape Duplicate Content Ownership Question
We have a site that has had its content copied verbatim to numerous other sites and articles. We were advised to change our content but the content is originally ours. Does google take that into account before they apply duplicate penalties? And shouldn't copyscape be able to show this information in their reports? It just doesnt seem right that the originating author would have to change content because everyone else is stealing it. Any clarification on this?
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
Duplicate meta descriptions
Hi all, I'm using Yoast's SEO plugin and when I run a On Page report card here on SEOMOZ it says there are 2 descriptions tags I've been trying to fix this but can't (I'm new!) Anyone any ideas on this? Thanks Elaine
On-Page Optimization | | elaineryan0 -
Duplicate page content & title for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php?
Hi, First post so please be gentle! My Crawl Diagnostics Summary is showing an error relating to duplicate page content and duplicate page title for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php which are, in my view, the same thing/page? Could anyone shed any light please? Thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Carl2870