Crawl Budget and Faceted Navigation
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Hi, we have an ecommerce website with facetted navigation for the various options available.
Google has 3.4 million webpages indexed. Many of which are over 90% duplicates.
Due to the low domain authority (15/100) Google is only crawling around 4,500 webpages per day, which we would like to improve/increase.
We know, in order not to waste crawl budget we should use the robots.txt to disallow parameter URL’s (i.e. ?option=, ?search= etc..). This makes sense as it would resolve many of the duplicate content issues and force Google to only crawl the main category, product pages etc.
However, having looked at the Google Search Console these pages are getting a significant amount of organic traffic on a monthly basis.
Is it worth disallowing these parameter URL’s in robots.txt, and hoping that this solves our crawl budget issues, thus helping to index and rank the most important webpages in less time.
Or is there a better solution?
Many thanks in advance.
Lee.
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Hello, I have also been in a similar situation. What I did was to disallow the urls with parameters using the robots.txt and place (in only the pages with parameters) the following two html tags:
This will expressly indicate to google not to index these pages. I still have some errors but I guess they will disappear in a few months.
Regards
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