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
-
Google indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
How to de-index old URLs after redesigning the website?
Thank you for reading. After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain). It would be nonsense to 301 redirect them as there are to many URLs. (or would it be nonsense?) What is the best way to deal with this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Rel="self" and what to do with it?
Hey there Mozzers, Another question about a forum issue I encountered. When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use rel="next" rel="prev" or rel="previous" But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called Rel="self" What that does is simple. If i have 3 pages http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3 **instead of this ** On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2 On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3: it creates this On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 I also have the same page at http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1 Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough? Should I change that?0 -
Do Page Views Matter? (ranking factor?)
Hi, I actually asked it a year and a half ago (with a slight variation) but didn't get any real response and things do change over time. On my eCommerce website I have the main category pages with client side filtering and sorting. As a result, the number of page views is lower than can be expected. Do you think having more page views is still a ranking factor? and if so is it more important than user experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
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 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"
Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia0