What to do with extremely high number of URLs on your site?
-
Here is the situation:
The site has tons of business and personal profiles, the information needed to be categorized as such directories were created in an attempt to keep the URL structure clean - so for example:
www.abc.com/product/um/name-here/city-name/state/lastname:3458765
Each profile has a unique ID#, and for some reason there needed to be a category for a user in this case /um/ stands for user name.
Webmaster tool steps to resolve state to use an rel=canonical which can be done for that directory /um/ but I am concerned about the bot not being able to find the other pages beyond that directory, like the profile name, city, state associated. So I guess my ultimate question is if I use rel=canonical will the rest of the content not get crawled or indexed as well?
-
This is not what the canonical tag is intended for.
The personal profiles will most likely be very low content dupes of each other like these which are indexed and should not be:
if pages deeper in that folder are good content worthy of being indexed then:
a) add noindex,follow to these profile pages
b) add index, follow to the deeper pages
that will keep the bots crawling the profile pages to the deeper folders with content you want indexed.
You can also disallow the /un/ (user name) folder and allow the deeper folders with robots.txt commands. We were just discussing this:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/allow-or-disallow-first-in-robots-txt
-
Does everything need to be indexed? If not, perhaps the personal profiles could be noindexed. Let the search engines crawl all of your content, but only have them index pages that provide value to the SERPs.\
Only use rel=canonical if the content on different URLs is the exact same. Using it incorrectly will cause content to not be indexed.
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
-
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
Removed URLs
recently my site has got some problem some of my URLs are repeating in the SERP ! I removed them by search console and also site : but they show up again Does anyone know what is wrong?
Technical SEO | | talaabshode20200 -
URL Parameters to Ignore
Hi Mozers, **We have a glossary of terms made up of a main page that lists out ALL of the terms, and then individual pages per alphabet letter that limit the results to that specific alphabet letter. These pages look like this: ** https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=A https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=B https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=C https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=D etc. If I'd like Google to remove all of these "expand=" pages from the index, such that only the main page is indexed, what is the exact parameter that I should ask Google to ignore in Search Console? "expand=" ? Just want to make sure! Thanks for the help!!!
Technical SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Magento URL change
We have a Magento website parked at HostGator. The site is comprised of both a PC and a mobile version. We changed the URL to a new one ... We made the domain changes in the ‘core_config_data’ (phpMyAdmin) ... We flushed the cache in the ‘File Manager’ part of cPanel (regular and mobile version) Currently we can access the http://newsite.com (on a desktop) with no problem ... We can also access http://m.newsite.com BUT… only from a desktop PC. When we try http://newsite.com from a MOBILE device, it routes to: http://m.OLDsite.com (it keeps going to the old URL) Need some help please. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0 -
Which is more accurate? site: or GWT?
when viewing urls in google's index, is it more accurate to refer to site:www.domain.com or google webmaster tools (urls in web index)?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0