Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?

[wcbuckner]

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 : )

[FedeEinhorn]

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).

[wcbuckner]

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?

[wcbuckner]

You guys rock! I'll try these out tomorrow. Thanks a million.

[FedeEinhorn]

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!

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[wcbuckner]

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?

[FedeEinhorn]

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!

[wcbuckner]

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?

[wcbuckner]

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?

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[FedeEinhorn]

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?