Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?
-
I just got a Mozcrawl back and see lots of errors for overly dynamic urls. The site is a villa rental site that gives users the ability to search by bedroom, amenities, price, etc, so I'm wondering what the best way to keep these types of dynamically generated pages with urls like /property-search-page/?location=any&status=any&type=any&bedrooms=9&bathrooms=any&min-price=any&max-price=any from indexing.
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated : )
-
If you have a page that lists all the villas outside the search results, then you don't lose anything by blocking that folder on the robots.txt
But still, somebody, the guy that wrote the custom theme knows how to do the changes needed.
If you want I can help you with it, for free
Just PM me (I'll need FTP access).
-
Having some trouble... Because the site is Wordpress, which dynamically generates pages, there is no /property-search-page/ nor is there a property-search-page.php in the editor files, so the only option I have is to put disallow: /property-search-page/ in the robots.txt file, correct?
-
You guys rock! I'll try these out tomorrow. Thanks a million.
-
If you have a /all-villas/ page then you should go ahead and noindex the search results as Google Guidelines suggests. You can either do it in the /property-search-page/ or using the robots.txt file.
In the robots.txt, add:
disallow: /property-search-page/
The robots method guarantees that no page inside that folder is indexed or even crawled (including /property-search-page/?whatever).
Or on the page /property-search-page/ you can add the meta noindex as such:
Then check if that meta tag is shown in all search results (just check a couple of them).
Hope that works!
-
Yes, it will. Also looks like custom code, it depends on how the header is coded. But it should work. Test it, if you can. This should solve your problems relatively easily. If nothing works, you can always do a robots.txt deny for /property-search-page/?* pages, but that's not a recommended solution. Try the canonical way to see if it works first.
-
We already have Yoast installed, but the errors are still showing up in the Moz report.
To clarify, let's assume we have another page that lists all the villas (/all-villas/). If I go to the property-search-page php file and canonical=rel it to /all-villas/, will it canonical=rel all /property-search-page/?whatever pages to the /all-villas/ page?
-
Well, that will make a little easier from one side and harder from the other.
You can try installing SEO by Yoast, that will put all the canonical tags for you, however, I think it won't link the search result pages to the canonical page that lists them all.
That might require a little coding.
If there's another page, outside /property-search-page/ folder that lists all villas, then you can disallow that folder in the robots.txt file, and that should fix it. If there isn't, well, then you will need to edit the /property-search-page/ page to use a static canonical tag that points to the page that lists all the villas removing any kind of filtering.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
I agree with Federico one hundred percent. Figure out what your primary SEO friendly URLs are for these kinds of pages and canonical them back to that page.
-
I wouldn't put a noindex meta on them, instead I would consider using a canonical tag pointing to the page that lists all the villas.
Anyway, what programming language are you using?
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
-
Best way to absorb discontinued brand/domain?
Our parent company is looking to absorb the domain of a brand we are discontinuing. The domain we want to absorb has a thousands of blog posts from 2010 onward. Much of the content is old but still high-converting. We would like to keep as much of the potential traffic as possible, but we don't want the parent website to become too large or lose credibility with too many 301 redirects. Any advice on the best way to do this?
Technical SEO | | NichGunn1 -
Canonical URL on frontpage
I have a site where the CMS system have added a canonical URL on my frontpage, pointing to a subpage on my site. Something like on my domain root.Google is still showing MyDomain.com as the result in the search engines which is good, but can't this approach hurt my ranking? I mean it's basically telling google that my frontpage content is located far down the hierarki, instead of my domain root, which of course have the most authority.
Technical SEO | | EdmondHong87
Something seems to indicate that this could very well be the case, as we lost several placements after moving to this new CMS system a few months ago.0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
Hi, We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain: www.example.com --> English version de.example.com --> German version Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a: www.example.com/de www.example.com/es Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
Url rewrite subfolder
Hi, How can i rewrite example.com/example1/example2/example3 to example.com/example3 And is there tools or software that can generate url rewrite... (not a plugin) Thanks !
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
"noindex" internal search result urls
Hi, Would applying "noindex" on any page (say internal search pages) or blocking via robots text, skew up the internal site search stats in Google Analytics? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | RaksG0 -
Wordpress noindex
Hi there, Does anyone no of a way to noindex all the "previous entries" pages in a wordpress blog. They usally show on domain.com/page/2/ etc. They are the small snippets that provide a summary of the all your posts. I've not been able to find a plugin to do this. Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
What is the best way to broaden the reach of our website?
We were specifically targeting the Capital Region of New York and environs and now our goal is to broaden the net to reach potential clients. Should I to drop the location terms we already have baked in to the copy and add broader location terms? OR just add newer terms? We're developing a new design that sharpens our focus, but here is what we have now: http://www.behancommunications.com Thanks for any suggestions
Technical SEO | | PatDowd0 -
Best Joomla SEO Extensions?
My website is a Joomla based website. My designer is good, but I don't think he knows that much about SEO . . . so I doubt if he added any extensions that can assist with SEO. I assume there are some good ones that can help my site. Does anyone know what/which Joomla extensions are must haves?
Technical SEO | | damon12120