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    4. Overly-Dynamic URL

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    Overly-Dynamic URL

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • dellamoda
      dellamoda last edited by

      Hi,

      We have over 5000 pages showing under

      Overly-Dynamic URL error

      Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like,

      http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y

      http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all

      http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3

      Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there?

      like:

      Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y

      if not how far into the url should be disallowed?

      So far we have added the following to our robots,txt

      Disallow: /?sort=title

      Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y

      Disallow: /?sort=price

      Disallow: /?clearall=Y

      Just not sure if they are correct.

      Any help would be greatly appreciated.

      Thank you,Kami

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • SebastianCowie
        SebastianCowie last edited by

        Hi Kami,

        It's unfortunate, but a number of modern day e-commerce platforms still suffer from poor canonicalisation and multiple URL's.

        If possible, rather than blocking off access to those queries via robots.txt or meta, I'd start by trying to specify a canonical URL when a query is created.

        E.G

        Query: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all
        Canonical: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html

        Failing that I'd try to implement a "follow,noindex" meta tag or via x-robots if you're any good with apache.

        If that's still a no go, then try GWT, Google is getting much better at handling dynamic URL's within e-commerce platforms and you can specify which queries Google should ignore directly within GWT

        There's a great post on Moz that deals with e-commerce and canonicalisation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/qa-from-ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues-webinar - I'd suggest starting there!

        As a last resort I'd look to block the URL's within robots.txt, but this prevents crawlers from flowing freely within your site and can result in poor indexation.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
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