Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to handle sorting, filtering, and pagination in ecommerce? Canonical is enough?
-
Hello,
after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site.
Current indexation status:
- The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages
- Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages
- Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages
Additional info:
- Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination.
- Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting:
example.com/category --> example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100
- Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed.
- When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position).
- In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages.
- The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000
And so I have a few questions:
- Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed?
- If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt?
- Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way?
- As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure?
Thanks in advance,
Andrew
-
Canonical reference links are the preferred technique for this.
If you do nothing, very likely the search engines will decide for you which variations of your pages to index, and the selection may not be ideal. If an index page can be filtered many different ways, the unfiltered version should be referenced as the canonical on each, and a self-referencing canonical link should also be specified on the unfiltered version.
You don't really yet want to disallow the crawling of the refinement paths, because without canonicals implemented, you might very well do more harm than good, finding important pages getting de-indexed. If at some point in the future you find that all the URLs from the refinement paths have been disappeared from the index, and your desired pages are all indexed properly, then at that future date you might want to disallow crawling of the refinement paths (in your robots.txt file). But, not yet, IMO.
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
-
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Sitemap generator which only includes canonical urls
Does anyone know of a 3rd party sitemap generator that will only include the canonical url's? Creating a sitemap with geo and sorting based parameters isn't the most ideal way to generate sitemaps. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas. Mind you we have hundreds of thousands of indexed url's and this can't be done with a simple text editor.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Proper Title Tags for ecommerce
In terms of E-commerce title tags. We are a manufacturer of our own clothing products. We are new to the SEO landscape so if this question is an obvious answer, then i apologize for wasting any one times in advance. We Manufacture our own clothing. Each item has a name. The names are American womens names such as amanda or lori or jenniffer etc. When we create the title tag for them should we include the name of the item itself at the beginning or end. For example should it be Item Name - Keyword - Keyword - Brand Name(aka manufacturer) or Keyword - Keyword - Item Name - Brand Name (aka manufacturer) The reason we ask this is because we think it would be a waste to rank for actual American names such as Jennifer and Jessica. All that we have read on Moz suggests that it seems to be better to have pertinent keywords in the beginning of the title as opposed to the end. In terms of our brand name we already rank number 1 for every combination of our brand. So we would like to start picking up traffic for the different product types we sell and there respective synonyms. Not sure if i am making any sense. Sorry in advance, and any help is very very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Imagination0 -
Pagination parameters and canonical
Hello, We have a site that manages pagination through parameters in urls, this way: friendly-url.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
friendly-url.html?p=2
friendly-url.html?p=3
... We've rencently added the canonical tag pointing to friendly-url.html for all paginated results. In search console, we have the "p" parameter identified by google.
Now that the canonical has been added, should we still configure the parameter in search console, and tell google that it is being use for pagination? Thank you!0 -
Adding a Canonical Tag to each page referencing itself?
Hey Mozers! I've noticed that on www.Zappos.com they have a Canonical tag on each page referencing it self. I have heard that this is a popular method but I dont see the point in canon tagging a page to its self. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Why is "Noindex" better than a "Canonical" for Pagination?
"Noindex" is a suggested pagination technique here: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284, and everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page, but I'd love if someone can explain why "noindex" is better than a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0