Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
-
Hi there,
The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure:
www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700
where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number.
Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be:
Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=*
Thanks for your help.
-
Just to add, if you block URLs in robots.txt they wont actually get deindexed. They will be for all intents and purposes be blocked (wont cause duplicate content issues etc) but they will drop into the omitted results:
_In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 13 already displayed._If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. And will look like this in the SERPS (see attachment).If you want them removed from the SERPs you will need to use the robots NOINDEX meta tag, or use GWMT as William advised.
The disallow entry you posted will block these pages, as long as they all start with that way. Although you don't actually need the trailing wild card as that gets ignored, you can just leave it open. Google robots.txt specs
-
Thanks William. I think I will stick with the Robots file in this case. I am nervous about using that parameter feature in case ?prodID is used in any other URL that should be indexed.
-
You can use that in your robots.txt, which should work on crawls.
Or
you can also go into WMT and setup your parameters, in this case would be ?prodID.
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
-
Rel="prev" / "next"
Hi guys, The tech department implemented rel="prev" and rel="next" on this website a long time ago.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
We also added a canonical tag to the 'own' page. We're talking about the following situation: https://bit.ly/2H3HpRD However we still see a situation where a lot of paginated pages are visible in the SERP.
Is this just a case of rel="prev" and "next" being directives to Google?
And in this specific case, Google deciding to not only show the 1st page in the SERP, but still show most of the paginated pages in the SERP? Please let me know, what you think. Regards,
Tom1 -
Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"
Hello, I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally. We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands. My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg). Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions. Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SilverStar11 -
Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
[e-commerce] Should I index product variants?
Hi guys, I have e-commerce site, that sells car tires. I was wondering would I benefit from making all Product Variants ( for example each tire size ) as different page, that has link to the main product to provide some affiliation, or should I make each variant noindex, and add rel=canonical to the main product. The benefits from having each variant indexed can be many: greater click through rate more relative results for customers etc. But I'm not sure how to handle the duplicate content issue ( in this case, only the title, URL and H1 can be different ). Regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo220 -
Should you stop indexing of short lived pages?
In my site there will be a lot of pages that have a short life span of about a week as they are items on sale, should I nofollow the links meaning the site has a fwe hundred pages or allow indexing and have thousands but then have lots of links to pages that do not exist. I would of course if allowing indexing make sure the page links does not error and sends them to a similarly relevant page but which is best for me with the SEarch Engines? I would like to have the option of loads of links with pages of loads of content but not if it is detrimental Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barney30120
