GWT, Editing URL Parameters for Ecommerce Features
-
I have had the setting of "let googlebot decide" on managing my URL parameters on an Ecommerce site in Magento. The products I sell come in different sizes and colors and finishes etc.
These parameters are showing up in Google Webmaster Tools and set for "let googlebot decide". Some of them have as many as 8 million urls monitored.
I changed the editing option to clam these parameters as "narrow searches", but still left the option to "let googlebot decide" (versus block urls).
Will blocking these erroneous urls serve any benefit? Does blocking these help with the crawl/seo?
-
Magento will generally canonicalize correctly by default. What I'm guessing you're seeing are category pages that have variables for faceted navigation - again, a pretty common issue in Magento. I've seen and even "fixed" this issue for past clients with no noticeable results.
If you ARE having problems getting your pages into Google's index (check indexation status in Webmaster tools and look for exact product/category URLs to check) there is a plugin that will remove the variables for faceted navigation on category pages. The main downside is that someone who emials/shares a link will not share it with the filters/sorting attached.
Generally I recommend leaving it alone. If you're not having indexation problems, though, it should be fine to leave alone and let Google figure it out.
-
Hi Nathan,
I tend to agree with Patrick, but if you aren't seeing any issues with SERP rankings then you may not wish to go changing anything.
If you plan to go ahead, here are my thoughts.
Don't go blocking the pages rather look into canonical tags, I asked a similar question yesterday and was pointed to some articles that proved useful.
Moz's guide on Canonicalization would be my first go to.
Plus there is always the Google guide on duplicate content which I would imagine you have already looked at - But just in case that's here.
If it's a case of TL;DR - There is little damage that can be done with correctly set up canonical tags, so get in touch with your web developer or hit the research harder and just set them up wither way. Adding the Canonical tags will do no harm and help rule out any duplicate content concerns.
Hope that helps,
Richard
-
Hi there
I wouldn't block these pages so long as you have your parameters set up in Google Webmaster Tools, as well as indicated paginated content.
Remember, there are opportunities with canonical tags as well, so again, I see no reason to block these pages.
As long as you take proper steps to avoid duplicate content and let engines know what is happening, you should be fine.
Hope this helps, this is just my opinion - good luck!
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
-
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
Inactive Products - Inactive URLs
Hi, In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability. Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later. To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available". If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once. 1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way? 2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice? 3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading11 -
Non-www URL showing in Blog
Thanks to Sanket Patel in an earlier query I've now got non-www pages showing as www. pages on my www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk website. But the Blog which is part of the site posts and pages still show as non-www pages. For example: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog/makadi-palace-hotel-makadi-bay/ I wonder if anyone has come upon the same problem and what the solution might be? Thanks, Colin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises1 -
Ecommerce website consolidation
I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic. I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites. Example: www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use. www.logocoolies.com www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one. Questions: What are the pros and cons in doing this? What would be the best way to do this? Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
How To Best Close An eCommerce Site?
We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Expiring URL seo
a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something. any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malachiii0