Thank you, David.

Hi there! When the data from an A/B test shows a difference in AOV between the variants, how do you determine if this difference is statistically probable or not? Best Regards, Martin

We do not currently have any sanitation rules in order to maintain the nocrawl param. But that is a good point. 301:ing will be difficult for us but I will definitely add the nocrawl param to the rel canonical of those internal SERPs.

Thank you, Igol. I will definitely look into your first suggestion.

Thank you, Cyrus.

This is what it looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /nocrawl=1

The weird thing is that when testing one of the sample URLs (given by Google as "problematic" in the GWMT message and that contains the nocrawl param) on the GWMT "Blocked URLs" page by entering the contents of our robots.txt and the sample URL, Google says crawling of the URL is disallowed for Googlebot.

On the top of the same page, it says "Never" under the heading "Fetched when" (translated from Swedish..). But when i "Fetch as Google" our robots.txt, Googlebot has no problems fetching it. So i guess the "Never" information is due to a GWMT bug?

I also tested our robots.txt against your recommended service http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check. It says all robots has access to the sample URL above, but I gather the tool is not wildcard-savvy.

I will not disclose our domain in this context, please tell me if it is ok to send you a PW.

About the noindex stuff. Basically, the nocrawl param is added to internal links pointing to internal search result pages filtered by more than two params. Although we allow crawling of less complicated internal serps, we disallow indexing of most of them by "meta noindex".

Igal, thank your for replying.

But robots.txt disallowing URLs by matching patterns has been supported by Googlebot for a long time now.

I'll send you a PW, Des.

Hi Mozzers!

We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter.

We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming.

But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems.

What could be the reason?

Best regards,

Martin

Thanks a lot, Tom. Time will tell...

Just one last thing:
what damage are you (and Google) thinking of when advising against removing URLs on a large scale through GWMT?

Personally, I think Google says so only because they want to keep as much information possible in their index.

Yes, I have put a conditional meta robots "noindex" on all pages whose URL contains more than 2 GET elements. It is also present on URLs containing parameters of little or no SEO value (e.g. the "price" parameter).

Regarding the nofollow directive, my plan is to not put it in the head but on the individual links pointing to URLs that should not be indexed. If we happen to get a backlink to one of these noindexed pages, I want the link value to get passed on to listed product pages.

My big worrie is what should I do if this de-indexation process takes forever...