Can I safely block my product listing from search? Does it even make sense?
-
Hi,
I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages.Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories.
My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views: 8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages).Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)?
Thanks,
G -
Have had a lot of success with that kind of deeper logic in the past, you can usually quite easily create such rules using robots.txt wildcards
-
Thanks for your answer and the link, that's actually very useful.
What I mainly struggle with is to understand what I can prune/not and based on what criterias. And the article you've linked is helping a fair bit on that aspect.I'm thinking to start on multiple filter pages with a rule such as "block product listing pages from being indexed if at least 2 filters have been selected". And then see how it impacts the site and my crawl budget.
-
Hello GhillC,
I think we need to agree on terminology first, but it sounds like you can safely limit some of Google's access. Some people call your "product listing pages" either "refinements", "facets", or "filters". When I read "product listing pages" I typically think of what is also called a "category" page, which is a page listing multiple products. A single product page is often referred to as a product detail page (PDP).
Now that we're on the same page (pun intended), let me know if this article answers your question. It is very dated (2011) but gets the point across, which is that you need to be strategic about which facets/refinements/filters you allow to be crawled and/or indexed: https://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck .
One more thing: 5% - 9% of traffic going directly from organic search into a page type would be considered significant for most businesses. When I look at pruning out page types, they're typically responsible for less than 0.5% of traffic from organic search.
-
A product page is a page speaking about a selected product.
Example: a page about the smartphone Samguns Supernova 30A product category is a page speaking about the category, or the type of product it falls into.
Example: smartphone or, if it is too broad, the Supernova lineA product listing is a page listing all the product refined with available criterias such as a product line.
Example: a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones
Or a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones with more than 128GB of HD.
Etc.Does it make more sense?
-
Can you explain the difference between the 'products listings' and the 'actual products themselves'?
You say you still want products and product categories to rank, but not product listings. But to most readers, a product listing is usually a product category or product page (so the info seems to contradict itself, which actually it may not do - just needs more explaining)
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
-
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
Should component pages be visible in the search result?
Hi everyone, My question is suppose i have a blog having 200 pages arranged in footer like seomoz blog and when i move to 2nd page and say the url is http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 and when i search exact url on google should this page be visible in search result or not. Since all component pages of seomoz blog are visible, i think this should not be a problem but when i see other popular blogs like SEJ and seroundtable none of their component pages are visible in search result. By the way i am using rel=prev and next but not robots: noindex, follow
Technical SEO | | himanshu3019890 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Wordpress Blog Blocked by Metarobots
Upon receiving my first crawl report from new pro SEOMoz acc (yaay!) I've found that the wordpress blog plugged into my site hasn't been getting crawled due to being blocked by metarobots. I'm not a developer and have very little tech expertise, but a search dug up that the issue stemmed from the wordpress site settings > privacy > Ask search engines not to index this site option being selected. On checking the blog "Allow search engines to index this site" was selected so I'm unsure what else to check. My level of expertise means I'm not confident going into the back end of the site and I don't have a tech guy on site to speak to. Has anyone else had this problem? Is it common and will I need to consult a developer to get this fixed? Many thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | paj19790 -
Ranking product reviews with same keywords and similar
How you would approach keyword optimization for content that people are searching for, and has the same product name, but with the network name on the end, and it’s basically a different phone on each network – or in other cases, it’s almost an identical phone but may have very minor differences. For example, iPhone 4S- sprint vs. iPhone 4S - verizon vs. iPhone 4S at&t How you would attempt to rank for the search terms?
Technical SEO | | kcorten0 -
Can changing a host provider impact search rankings?
I was wondering if changing my host provider would impact my search rankings on the major search engines?
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0 -
New Site Search Critique
Hi I am a huge fan of the SEOMOZ site and this great community which has helped me learn the current SEO skills I have now which are still very basic compared to the pros on the forum. I have tried to follow best practice regarding onsite and technical seo when developing my new site www.cheapfindergames.com and I would really appreciate it if experts on the forum could spare a minute to critique the site from a search perspective please This will give any elements of what onsite and technical SEO I done well and what aspects still need work. I am currently trying to build quality links and social mentions into the site which will take time, and the site has been designed around usability and conversions. Many Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
New information in the description in natural search
Hello I wonder what that information to appear highlighted in the description in the attached file ... this is new to me. tks DLvtI.png
Technical SEO | | eder.machado0