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.
Can using nofollow on magento layered navigation hurt?
-
Howdy Mozzers!
We would like to use no follow, no index on our magento layered navigation pages after any two filters are selected. (We are using single filter pages as landing page, so we would liked them indexed)
Is it ok to use nofollow, noindex on these filter pages? Are there disadvantages of using nofollow on internal pages?
Matt mentioned refraining from using nofollow internally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8
But we would like to conserve crawling bandwidth and PR flow on potentially 100's of thousands of irrelevant/duplicate filter pages.
-
I understand I might be a little late, but I had experienced this issue first hand with a Magento site. Once I added a wildcard exclusion in the robots.txt file my impressions and click improved noticeably.
-
HI,
That is quite a few pages!
If the main issue is crawling related then robots.txt is probably the best way to go, I think the meta tags will still allow the pages to be crawled (they have to be for the tag to be read). Check out the comments in this and this post for wildcard matching in robots.txt which should do what you need. If the pages are indexed then it might be wise to leave a bit of time so that the noindex tags are picked up and then implement the crawl blocking in the robots.txt (and test in GWT to make sure you are not accidentally blocking more then you think). In this case I think you could still leave out the nofollow meta tag but this might just be personal opinion now - I'm not sure if in practice it would make much difference once you have no indexed and blocked crawling!
-
Hi Lynn,
Thank you for your valuable input on the matter. Yes, using meta tags in the header. We are currently submitting filter pages that we want indexed through the site map, so google bot should be able to reach these pages. Also, we are displaying noindex, nofollow tags only on filter pages which have a combination of more than two filters selected as we do not need to go any deeper than that.
I understand your point of using noindex, follow instead of noindex, nofollow to prevent unexpected crawl issues. But on the contrary, don't you think we could conserve crawling bandwidth using noindex, nofollow tags on filter pages that serve no purpose being crawled and probably wont be externally linked to either?
We currently have around 7 filters, some with many values. This can create combinations of more than 500,000 filter pages...
Thanks
-
Hi,
I assume you mean in a meta header tag for these pages? As a general rule I would avoid using nofollow and simply noindex the pages in question. If you are implementing this with a meta tag then the pages will be reached from the layered navigation links anyway so they would then be a dead end for both PR and the crawler - with the potential to cause unexpected crawl problems rather than optimising it.
As long as you are addressing as best you can any duplicate content issues caused by the layered navigation (check out this post for a good rundown on the various solutions) then I would leave the noindex in place and let the crawler follow the links as normal.
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
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Should I use the on classified listing pages that have expired?
We have went back and forth on this and wanted to get some outside input. I work for an online listing website that has classified ads on it. These ads are generated by companies on our site advertising weekend events around the country. We have about 10,000 companies that use our service to generate their online ads. This means that we have thousands of pages being created each week. The ads have lots of content: pictures, sale descriptions, and company information. After the ads have expired, and the sale is no longer happening, we are currently placing the in the heads of each page. The content is not relative anymore since the ad has ended. The only value the content offers a searcher is the images (there are millions on expired ads) and the descriptions of the items for sale. We currently are the leader in our industry and control most of the top spots on Google for our keywords. We have been worried about cluttering up the search results with pages of ads that are expired. In our Moz account right now we currently have over 28k crawler warnings alerting us to the being in the page heads of the expired ads. Seeing those warnings have made us nervous and second guessing what we are doing. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Should we continue with placing the in the heads of the expired ads, or should we be allowing search engines to index the old pages. I have seen websites with discontinued products keeping the products around so that individuals can look up past information. This is the closest thing have seen to our situation. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated! -Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mellison0 -
Using CSS to hide anchor text
Hi all, In my website, I would like to use CSS to set the anchor text to "website design service"(my company provides web design service) but show the button text as "website", due to some artistic reasons. Therefore, the anchor text for the link is "website design service" but what users see is "websites". Does this sound spammy to Google? Is it a risky move that might hurt my SEO? Looking for some advises here. Thank you very much. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Will the use of lightbox affect SEO?
I am looking to condense a features list on my pricing page. it is currently a static list however I want the user to click a button and a full list of standard features will pop up in a lightbox. How will this affect my SEO? Can Google read content in a lightbox?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParkerSoftware0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!0 -
Should I Use City Name in URL?
Having a website designed for a car dealership and deciding what attributes to use in the URL. Should I include the city name in the URL? Or does that help for SEO purposes? Other ideas of what to research or try are appreciated too. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss0