Robots.txt & Duplicate Content
-
In reviewing my crawl results I have 5666 pages of duplicate content. I believe this is because many of the indexed pages are just different ways to get to the same content. There is one primary culprit. It's a series of URL's related to CatalogSearch - for example; http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=Mobile
I have 10074 of those links indexed according to my MOZ crawl. Of those 5349 are tagged as duplicate content. Another 4725 are not.
Here are some additional sample links:
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=desc&order=relevance&p=2&q=Amy
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?color=28&q=bellemonde
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?cat=9&color=241&dir=asc&order=relevance&q=baggalliniAll of these links are just different ways of searching through our product catalog. My question is should we disallow - catalogsearch via the robots file? Are these links doing more harm than good?
-
For product pages, I would canonical the page with the most descriptive URL.
For category pages, I agree with you, I would noindex them.
I think I just answered my own question!!
-
Oke, the question concerning rel="canonical" is which URL becomes the canonical version? Since there is no page on the website which would be appropiate (as far as i've seen) i recommended the meta robots tag.
I do agree that rel="canonical" is the preferred option, but in this situation i can't see a way to implement it properly. Which page would you highlight as the canonical?
-
I agree entirely that "Search result pages are too varied to be included in the index".
That said, my understanding is that if you canonical a page, it doesn't get indexed. So we wouldn't have to worry about the appearance / user-friendliness of the URL. But (again, in my opinion) we should still worry about link equity being passed, and that won't happen if you noindex.
This gets complicated fast. I like your solution b/c it's a lot cleaner and easier to implement. Still not convinced it's the "best" way to go though.
-
Where is the evidence that these work? I have never seen them work. Google totally ignores the URL parameters tools in GWTs.
-
I do agree that a rel="canonical" is good option for the problem that's at hand.
As jeremy has stated however the link we are referring to in the href section redirects to the home page. http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/In my original answer i did not test this. I assumed there would be a list of all products here not filtered by search results. Since this is not the case and this page in fact does not exist it's hard to point at a url to be canonical.
Therefor i changed my answer to include the robots meta tag. This would indeed remove the search pages from the search index. I do think this is a positive thing though.
Look at the following url: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=rolling+laptop+bags
Not really the type of URL i would click on in the search results. The following URL however is something i would want to click on: http://www.careerbags.com/laptop-bags/women-s/rolling-laptop-bags.html
Search result pages are too varied to be included in the index to my opinion.
Hope you agree with this, if not then i would like to hear your thoughts on this.
-
Simon, Wesley, Michael...
These customer facing search result pages are the ones often bookmarked and shared by site visitors. How worried does one need to be about losing link equity? I realize every site is going to be different and social shares don't have link equity - at least for now - but this could add up over time. The rel canonical will enable capture of link equity whereas the robots noindex will not.
Am I over thinking this?
-
In this case you could add the meta robots tag on the search result pages like this:
content="noindex, follow">
Search results can indeed spawn an infinite amount of different URL's. This can be avoided by making sure they are not included in the index but are followed.
-
Webmaster guidelines specifically request that you prevent crawling of search results pages using a robots.txt file. The relevant section reads: "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."
-
There are 2 distinct possible issues here
1. Search results are creating duplicate content
2. Search results are creating lots of thin content
You want to give the user every possibility of finding your products, but you don't want those search results indexed because you should already have your source product page indexed and aiming to rank well. If not see last paragraph.
I slightly misread your post and took the URLs to be purely filtered. You should add disallow /catalogsearch to your robots.txt and if any are indexed you can remove the directory in Webmaster Tools > Google Index > Remove URLs > Reason: Remove Directory. This from Google - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/
If your site has any other parameters not in that directory you can add them in Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters > Let Googlebot Decide. Google will understand they are not the main URLs and treat them accordingly.
As a side issue with your search results it would be a good idea to analyse them in Analytics. You might find you have a trend, maybe something searched for or not the perfect match for the returned result, where you can create new more targeted content.
-
I'm not sure this is the right approach. The catalog search is based on the search box on the website. The query parameter can be anything the customer enters. Are you suggesting that the backend code be modified to always return the in every result?
And why that page because that URL just redirects to the home page because there is no query parameter provided for the search.
In terms o losing link equity, how much equity do they have it they are duplicate content?
-
Hi Jeremy.
Yours is a common problem. The best way to deal with it is, as Wesley mentions, by putting canonical tags on all the duplicate pages - the one you want indexed and to show up in search results AND all the others that you can arrive at via catalog search or any other means of navigation.
Michael's suggestion will prevent the duplicate pages from getting indexed by Google. Unfortunately you lose any link equity going that route, so I'd suggest starting with canonical tags first.
-
To back up the detail Wesley gave you, you can also add URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools
-
You could add a canonical tag to link to the default page. This way Google will know that it should only index that.
The code for this would be:This should be placed in the section of your HTML code.
Some more resources on the subject:
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
-
Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?
Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match? e.g: I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block /fish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian
/fish.html
/fish/salmon.html
/fishheads
/fishheads/yummy.html
/fish.php?id=anything But would it block?: en/fish
en/fish.html
en/fish/salmon.html
en/fishheads
en/fishheads/yummy.html
**en/fish.php?id=anything (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier! As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as: http://www.example.com/BTS-something
http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as: http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy Thanks for listening0 -
Robots.txt: Syntax URL to disallow
Did someone ever experience some "collateral damages" when it's about "disallowing" some URLs? Some old URLs are still present on our website and while we are "cleaning" them off the site (which takes time), I would like to to avoid their indexation through the robots.txt file. The old URLs syntax is "/brand//13" while the new ones are "/brand/samsung/13." (note that there is 2 slash on the URL after the word "brand") Do I risk to erase from the SERPs the new good URLs if I add to the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /brand//" ? I don't think so, but thank you to everyone who will be able to help me to clear this out 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Will disallowing in robots.txt noindex a page?
Google has indexed a page I wish to remove. I would like to meta noindex but the CMS isn't allowing me too right now. A suggestion o disallow in robots.txt would simply stop them crawling I expect or is it also an instruction to noindex? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Http and https duplicate content?
Hello, This is a quick one or two. 🙂 If I have a page accessible on http and https count as duplicate content? What about external links pointing to my website to the http or https page. Regards, Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag. Manually changing the descriptions is not an option. Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"? Any other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0