Webmaster tool parameters
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Hey forum,
About my site, idealchooser.com. Few weeks ago I've defined a parameter "sort" at the Google Webmaster tool that says effect: "Sorts" and Crawl: "No URLs". The logic is simple, I don't want Google to crawl and index the same pages with a different sort parameter, only the default page without this parameter.
The weird thing is that under "HTML Improvement" Google keeps finding "Duplicate Title Tag" for the exact same pages with a different sort parameter. For example:
/shop/Kids-Pants/16//shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=Price/shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=PriceHi
These aren't old pages and were flagged by Google as duplicates weeks after the sort parameter was defined.
Any idea how to solve it? It seems like Google ignores my parameters handling requests.
Thank you.
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I just thought of something else, if I do a robots.txt disallow to this parameter, wouldn't it kill all the rankings from external links to pages that contain this parameter?
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It's been at least 6 weeks since I set it up, probably more like 2 months.
Thanks for the robots.txt idea, I'll give it a shot. However I would still like to figure out what is going on with Google parameter definition.
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How long you have set this? I think it may take up some time before you can see some changes in Google Webmaster Tools. But again I personally do not like Google Parameter handling tools because it is meant only for Google and therefore, your website will appear duplicate to other search engines. So, I would rather use robots.txt file to fix this. A simple tag like – Disallow: /?sort=*
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