Large site with faceted navigation using rel=canonical, but Google still has issues
-
First off, I just wanted to mention I did post this on one other forum so I hope that is not completely against the rules here or anything. Just trying to get an idea from some of the pros at both sources. Hope this is received well. Now for the question.....
"Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:"
Gotta love these messages in GWT. Anyway, I wanted to get some other opinions here so if anyone has experienced something similar or has any recommendations I would love to hear them.
First off, the site is very large and utilizes faceted navigation to help visitors sift through results. I have implemented rel=canonical for many months now to have each page url that is created based on the faceted nav filters, push back to the main category page. However, I still get these damn messages from Google every month or so saying that they found too many pages on the site. My main concern obviously is wasting crawler time on all these pages that I am trying to do what they ask in these instances and tell them to ignore and find the content on page x.
So at this point I am thinking about possibly using robots.txt file to handle these, but wanted to see what others around here thought before I dive into this arduous task. Plus I am a little ticked off that Google is not following a standard they helped bring to the table.
Thanks for those who take the time to respond in advance.
-
Yes that's a different situation. You're now talking about pagination, which quite rightly, canonicals to parent page is not to be used.
For faceted/filtered navigation it seems like canonical usage is indeed the right way to go about it, given Peter's experience just mentioned above, and the article you linked to that says, "...(in part because Google only indexes the content on the canonical page, so any content from the rest of the pages in the series would be ignored)."
-
As for my situation it worked out quite nicely, I just wasn't patient enough. After about 2 months the issue corrected itself for the most part and I was able to reduce about a million "waste" pages out of the index. This is a very large site so losing a million pages in a handful of categories helped me gain in a whole lot of other areas and spread the crawler around to more places that were important for us.
I also spent some time doing some restructuring of internal linking from some of our more authoritative pages that I believe also assisted with this, but in my case rel="canonical" worked out pretty nicely. Just took some time and patience.
-
I should actually add that Google doesn't condone using rel-canonical back to the main search page or page 1. They allow canonical to a "View All" or a complex mix of rel-canonical and rel=prev/next. If you use rel-canonical on too many non-identical pages, they could ignore it (although I don't often find that to be true).
Vanessa Fox just did a write-up on Google's approach:
http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970
I have to be honest, though - I'm not a fan of Google's approach. It's incredibly complicated, easy to screw up, doesn't seem to work in all cases, and doesn't work on Bing. This is a very complex issue and really depends on the site in question. Adam Audette did a good write-up:
http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494
-
Thanks Dr Pete,
Yes I've used meta no-index on pages that are simply not useful in any way shape or form for Google to find.
I would be hesitant noindexing my filters in question, but it sounds promising that you are backing the canonical approach and there is a latency on reporting. Our PA and DA is extremely high and we get crawled daily, so curious about your measurement tip (inurl) which is a good one!
Many thanks.
Simon
-
I'm working on a couple of cases now, and it is extremely tricky. Google often doesn't re-crawl/re-cache deeper pages for weeks or months, so getting the canonical to work can be a long process. Still, it is generally a very effective tag and can happen quickly.
I agree with others that Robots.txt isn't a good bet. It also tends to work badly with pages that are already indexed. It's good for keeping things out of the index (especially whole folders, for example), but once 1000s of pages are indexed, Robots.txt often won't clean them up.
Another option is META NOINDEX, but it depends on the nature of the facets.
A couple of things to check:
(1) Using site: with inurl:, monitor the faceted navigation pages in the Google index. Are the numbers gradually dropping? That's what you want to see - the GWT error may not update very often. Keep in mind that these numbers can be unreliable, so monitor them daily over a few weeks.
(2) Are there are other URLs you're missing? On a large, e-commerce site, it's entirely possibly this wasn't the only problem.
(3) Did you cut the crawl paths? A common problem is that people canonical, 301-redirect, or NOINDEX, but then nofollow or otherwise cut links to those duplicates. Sounds like a good idea, except that the canonical tag has to be crawled to work. I see this a lot, actually.
-
Did you find a solution for this? I have exactly the same issue and have implemented the rel canonical in exactly the same way.
The issue you are trying to address is improving crawl bandwidth/equity by not letting Google crawl these faceted pages.
I am thinking of Ajax loading in these pages to the parent category page and/or adding nofollow to the links. But the pages have already been indexed, so I wonder if nofollow will have any effect.
Have you had any progress? Any further ideas?
-
Because rel canonical does nothing more than give credit to teh chosen page and aviod duplicat content. it does not tell the SE to stop indexing or redirect. as far as finding the links it has no affect
-
thx
-
OK, sorry I was thinking too many pages, not links.
using no-index will not stop PR flowing, the search engine will still follow the links. -
Yeah that is why I am not real excited about using robots.txt or even a no index in this instance. They are not session ids, but more like:
www.example.com/catgeoryname/a,
www.example.com/catgeoryname/b
www.example.com/catgeoryname/c
etc
which would show all products that start with those letters. There are a lot of other filters too, such as color, size, etc, but the bottom line is I point all those back to just www.example.com/categoryname using rel canonical and am not understanding why it isn't working properly.
-
There are a large number of urls like this because of the way the faceted navigation works and I have considered no index, but somewhat concerned as we do get links to some of these urls and would like to maintain some of that link juice. The warning shows up in Google Webmaster tools when Googlebot finds a large number of urls. The rest of the message reads like this:
"Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site."
rel canonical should fix this, but apparently it is not
-
Check how you are getting these pages.
Robots.txt is not an ideal solution. If Google finds pages in other places, still these pages will be crawled.
Normally print pages won't have link value and you may no index them.
If there are pages with session ids or campaign codes, use canonical if they have link value. Otherwise no index will be good.
-
the rel canonical with stop you getting duplicate content flags, but there is still a large number of pages its not going to hide them.
I have never seen this warning, how many pages are we talking about?, either it is very very high, or they are confusing the crawler.You may need to no index them
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
-
If my article is reposted on another blog, using re=canonical, does that count as a link back?
Hey all! My company blog is interested in letting another blog repost our article. We would ask them to use "re-canonical" in the mark-up to avoid Google digging through "duplicate" info out there. I was wondering, if the other site does use the "re=canonical", will that appear as a backlink or no? I understand that metrics will flow back to my original URL and not the canonical one, but I am wondering if the repost will additionally show as a backlink. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | cmguidry0 -
Canonical tag on search.asp resultpage or what to do?
Hi, Im starting out doing SEO on my websites. My issue now is, that I have this searchpage called search.asp where it's possible to search for profiles on my website. When you go to search.asp the page displays all profiles as default, and it's then possible to change things like age, hairlenght and lots of small variables. When you submit the queries, the url would be some linke this:
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
wwww.site.com/search.asp?agefrom=10&ageto=40&haircolor=1&area=Denmark and so... There is thousands of different "urls" it could change to, which is kinda bad in SEO i guess. ATM the title tag is always "Searching for profiles", but i plan to change that, so the searchquery would be part of the title. The problem is, that right now, this page generates tons of dublicate content. So, my issue is, what to do? 1. Should I create a or would that "harm" my site? 2. Other ideas? /Kasper0 -
Google Mobile Algorithm update
Hi there, On April the 21st Google seems to going to update their Mobile algorithm. I have a few questions about this one. Our current mobile website is very mobile friendly. We block all mobile pages with a noindex, so the desktop pages have been indexed on mobile devices. We use a redirect from desktop page to mobile page when someone hits a result on a mobile device. My gut tells me this is not April 21st-proof so I'm thinking about an update to make this whole thing adaptive. By making the thing adaptive, our mobile pages will be indexed instead of the desktop pages. Two questions: Will Google treat the mobile page as a 100% different page than the desktop page? Or will it match those two because everything will tell Google those belong together. In other words: will the mobile page start with a zero authority and will pages lose good organic positions because of authority or not? Which ranking factor will be stronger after April 21st for mobile pages: page authority or mobile friendliness? In other words: is it worth ignoring the 21 April update because the authority of the desktop pages is more important than making every page super mobile friendly? Hope to get some good advice! Marcel
Algorithm Updates | | MarcelMoz0 -
AS we using the keyword related to our link but we are not listed in first page of Google search
AS we using the keyword related to our link but we are not listed in first page of Google search, but our competitors using the same keyword , they are listing in first page. how we can short this problem and get into first page on search
Algorithm Updates | | krisanantha0 -
Google doesnt index my Google+ Profile
Hey guys! I know it sounds like a novice question, but I have checked ALL THE BOXES THAT TELL GOOGLE TO INDEX MY GOOGLE+ PROFILE. It is Visible for search - 100%. It's been 3 weeks since I opened a Google+ profile and it still hasn't been indexed for its name. Any guesses what's going on? (It's not this name so don't try to google me)
Algorithm Updates | | Yoav_Vilner0 -
How vital is it for a site to have a mobile site for mobile SEO?
With the exponential growth in mobile device sales and usage and an expected 980% growth in advertising next year for/on mobile devices, we at http://www.mobilewebsitegurus.com decided that it was time to help companies create great looking mobile websites that are user friendly and SEO friendly at affordable rates with tons of features built in from the start. However, when selling our design, how important is it to have a GOOD mobile site compared to a big one to rank on mobile devices? We head that Google was thinking of only showing mobile sites on mobile devices. NOT TRUE. Then we read/heard that the rankings were MUCH BETTER if you had a mobile site, but after a lot of research we found that too NOT to be true. On most sites there were NO difference. So what is the TRUTH about this and is it maybe just that it will happen, just has not happened yet - the different rankings for mobile and regular sites on mobile devices that is? ANY insight in this would be great not only for us but for the entire SEO community 🙂 Thanks. ALSO, add "Mobile SEO" to the boxes below of "Topics" since mobile SEO will grow in importance.
Algorithm Updates | | yvonneq0 -
Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years. Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products. The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed. The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable. Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
Algorithm Updates | | DavidWilsonSEO0 -
Are you getting any action from Google +1 ?
If you have added google plus one to your website you can check on the impact by visiting your webmaster tools account. In your GWT account you will see a left menu item for "+1 Metrics". If you click on "Search Impact" you can see the CTR change attributed to +1. Anybody seeing anything there yet?
Algorithm Updates | | EGOL0