Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Help with facet URLs in Magento

    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.

    Help with facet URLs in Magento

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    1350
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • HappyJackJr
      HappyJackJr last edited by

      Hi Guys,

      Wondering if I can get some technical help here...

      We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout.

      These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process.

      Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example,

      http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19

      Canonical to...

      http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html

      Which I understand to be incorrect.

      As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution?

      As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series.

      Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black )

      But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior?

      My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls.

      Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter.

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • HappyJackJr
        HappyJackJr @PinpointDesigns last edited by

        Hi Lewis,

        Firstly thank you for taking your time to respond in depth to my question.

        Since reading your response, I have done the following...

        Identified the parameters that should NOT be indexed, these are; 'brand=', 'min=' and 'max='

        The colour filter 'colour=' is to be kept indexed. I have reviewed the website and found that users cannot currently select to filter more than on colour, which eliminates Google from indexing multiple colour filters in one URL.

        However, users can still filter by colour and brand, hence why I have requested ours devs to meta noindex any URL that contains the 'brand=' parameter as well as any URLs that have the 'min/max=' parameters as these are price filters.

        I have also requested rel=next/prev to be implemented correctly.

        The above should drastically reduce our indexed content.

        As well as this, I have added the following parameters into Search Consoles' URL Parameter tool as 'No Crawl', 'brand, min, max' -  although I understand this is not a guaranteed fix, it was my first option with no immediate dev time over the weekend.

        Now the only URLs in need of a canonical is the colour filtered URLs as 'brand, min max' are all noindex. I have asked dev to ensure the canonical points back to page 1 for now, however I am looking into a view-all page option so the canonical would point to that.

        A good learning curve all of this!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • BlueprintMarketing
          BlueprintMarketing last edited by

          There is a big difference between robots.txt and no index

          "Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black )

          But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior?"

          See http://i.imgur.com/114BHcR.png

          You need to use a no index tag not robots.txt ideally with a secular canonical pointing to the product.

          Please see references one and two below.  There are larger versions of the photos below as well

          You need to run your site through deep crawl and or screaming frog SEO spider If you would be kind enough to give me the URL privately or publicly I will run a deep crawl and SEO spider

          ** This topic is difficult to explain without using the ability to show videos and images inside the box while describing this. That's why I recommend you view this YouTube video and slide share.**

          Deep crawl is fantastic at solving these issues it has done this for other magenta clients of mine, and I strongly recommend utilizing what you've learned from that webinar and the other references below.

          please see one and two below

          1. https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/webinars/masterclass-webinar-faceted-navigation-for-seo/
          2. https://www.stonetemple.com/seo-tags-virtual-keynote-with-gary-illyes-and-eric-enge/
          • https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

          • https://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck

          • http://searchengineland.com/google-offers-advice-faceted-navigation-infinite-scroll-web-pages-184232

          • _ http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/5-protips-for-optimizing-faceted-navigation-for-seo/_

          • http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

          larger versions of the images

          • http://i.imgur.com/xJeFTbY.jpg
          • http://i.imgur.com/wOHxaEE.jpg
          • http://i.imgur.com/QprPUyk.jpg

          I agree with Lewis's recommendation for an extension and have added a couple more.

          • http://www.mageworx.com/magento-2-seo-extension.html
          • https://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/ultimate-seo-suite.html
          • https://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-2-extensions/layered-navigation

          I Hope this helps,

          Thomas

          78tExl8.png nMrYeUWlslY xJeFTbY.jpg wOHxaEE.jpg QprPUyk.jpg 114BHcR.png

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • PinpointDesigns
            PinpointDesigns last edited by

            Hi!

            We do a lot of consultancy for Magento projects and this is a question that comes up quite regularly as it can't really be handled perfectly straight out of the box with Magento.

            Every implementation is a little bit different, but I'll put together some recommendations below based on the information available at the moment.

            For your faceted navigation, you ideally don't want to index any of these pages, unless you believe that you'll rank in your own right for specific filters (e.g. Colour, like you pointed out in your last message).

            That then comes with some additional complications. In Magento, if you have 3 colours available in the faceted nav, you'll have all the different variations indexed in each combination.

            For example:

            Blue
            Black
            Red

            Blue + Black
            Blue + Red
            Black + Red
            Black + Blue
            Red + Blue
            Red + Black

            Magento as standard doesn't always keep the filters in the same order, so you can end up with literally thousands of pages ending up in the index for a relatively small number of attributes being shown on your pages.

            There are a few recommendations here:

            1. Go and look at the MageWorx Ultimate SEO Suite Plugin - http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite-ultimate-magento-extension.html - For $249, it solves a lot of issues Magneto has straight out of the box and gives you ultimate control over your meta titles.

            What you want to do is set all of your facets to 'NOINDEX,FOLLOW' where possible. This will reduce the number of URLs in the index gradually. An example of this would be adding ?min=* and mode=* etc (grid/list variants).

            1. For your canonicals, you're probably best setting the canonical to the current filtered page (for example, if you're on a category page with colour = blue selected in your faceted nav, you'd have this URL as your canonical). Some sites we work on have it setup so the canonical points to the category URL (like you currently have).

            Finally, you probably want to build an extension to allow you to inject content into the filtered content pages. If you're using an extension like ManaDev for your facet navigation, this can be achieved fairly easily and allows you to add a block of text to each filter applied on a page.

            You should also look to request each of the incorrectly indexed URLs is removed from the index (although this does take a long time if you have a lot!).

            We wrote a really long guide around launching a Magento website last month which may be of interest - https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/the-definitive-guide-to-launching-a-magento-website/. We've also done a guide on Common Magento SEO Issues here - https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/common-magento-seo-issues/ and I previously wrote a guide on setting Magento up for Search Engines on Moz - https://moz.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines (Although this is likely to be a little outdated now)

            I hope this helps!
            Lewis

            HappyJackJr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • viatrading1

              Inactive Products - Inactive URLs

              Hi, In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability. Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later. To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available". If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once. 1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way? 2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice? 3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once? Thank you,

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
              1
            • ang

              URL structure change and xml sitemap

              At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ang
              0
            • tomcraig86

              Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch

              Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig86
              0
            • mdmoz

              Changing my pages URL name - HELP NEEDED FAST

              Hello, I need to change the URL name for a few pages on my site. The site was launched just recently, so it has no obvious ranking and traffic. My question is, what is the best practice for changing/deleting the page name? after deleting the page, should I go to Google webmaster tool and use URL Removal and remove the old page? I know that I have to also create a new XML sitemap file, but not sure about the old pages in google search result Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mdmoz
              0
            • Blink-SEO

              URL mapping for site migration

              Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
              0
            • browndoginteractive

              Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)

              Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
              2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality:  http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results:  Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index:  robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages.  I say "force" because of the crawl budget required.  Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links.  Best of both worlds:  crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution:  using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | browndoginteractive
              0
            • salvyy

              Exact keyword URL or not?

              Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy
              0
            • WebMarketingandDesign

              Multiple URLs for the same page

              I am working with a client and recently discovered that they have several URLs that go to the same page. http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx
              http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx
              http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF
              http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FS
              http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=FF
              http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=ffhttp://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=MShttp://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=
              http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF#
              http://www.maps.com/FunFacts
              http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?.nav=FF I am afraid this is happening all over the site. So, my question is: Is this hurting the SEO and how? If so what is the best way to go about fixing this problem? Thanks for your help!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMarketingandDesign
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.