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
-
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
-
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!
-
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
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/webinars/masterclass-webinar-faceted-navigation-for-seo/
- 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
larger versions of the images
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
-
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
RedBlue + Black
Blue + Red
Black + Red
Black + Blue
Red + Blue
Red + BlackMagento 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:
- 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).
- 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
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 Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
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-SEO0 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
URL Error or Penguin Penalty?
I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst. If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen). Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today. I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is: | URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html | | Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840