URL Parameters
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Hi there, I have a magento sort by feature which has indexed loads of pages in Google with urls that have /shopby/ in them.Over 8k pages have been indexed like this. I cannot edit the robots within the page but have now disallowed the urls in robots.txt - i guess this will prevent new ones being indexed but not deindex current ones?
So I looked into URL parameters, I added 'shopby' as a parameter in webmaster tools and told Google not to crawl any urls with this in it, will this deindex the pages already indexed?
The only other way seems to be manually removing 8k urls, which i do not want to do.
Any advice much appreciated. Obviously I do not want these urls indexed as they are weak/duplicate sort by search pages, I fear the panda update would not be too kind on it long term?
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That would be correct. What you have are "self referencing" canonical tags. That does the exact opposite of what you need it to do. It tells Google all of those pages are valid, where you need it to tell Google all of those pages are just copies of only ONE valid page.
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Yes.
The idea of having a canonical is to point it to another page, many just don't get this
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Hi guys. Well the site has been setup so every page has a unique canonical tag, the canonical tag being the url it is on.
I guess I need to find a way in magento to make all /shopby/ urls have the same canonical tag then it will deindex once Google recrawl?
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Assuming you have your canonicals done correctly, the pages will disappear in time.
the pages you wont to de-index, should have a canonical tag that points to the original.
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Hi there, the canonical tags are there but the pages are still indexed.
No links point to these pages, they are just sort by urls being generated off a widget.
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I would not de index the page either with robots or WMT.
links in your site that point to any of these pages will now pour their link juice into un indexed pages.
use a canonical tag to fix the problem.
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