350 (Out the 750) Internal Links Listed by Webmaster Tools Dynamically Generated-Best to Remove?
-
Greetings MOZ Community:
When visitors enter real estate search parameters in our commercial real estate web site, the parameters are somehow getting indexed as internal links in Google Webmaster Tools. About half are 700 internal links are derived from these dynamic URLs.
It seems to me that these dynamic alphanumeric URL links would dilute the value of the remaining static links.
Are the dynamic URLs a major issue? Are they high priority to remove?
The dynamic URLs look like this:
These URLs do not show up when a SITE: URL search is done on Google!
-
I believe your problem is in your robots.txt file. You're attempting a wildcard blocking of the search results pages with this line:
Disallow: /listings/search**?***
However, the asterisk ought to precede the question mark. If you want to block all URLs that include a question mark (?), do this:
Disallow: /listings/search***?**
Try that and see what happens. I've also found Aaron Wall's article on robots.txt to be helpful. Good luck!
Also, adding "noindex, nofollow" to the section does not necessarily keep a web page out of Google's index. When you think about it, you realize Google has to crawl the page the see that meta tag in the first place. Robots.txt is much stronger.
-
Hi Dennis:
The pages that display these search results are set to no-index, no-follow. They do not get indexed by Google in search results, just somehow register as about 200 links in internal links in Google Webmaster Tools.
How would I get these removed as links if they are no getting indexed by Google as pages? If I did get them removed is there a way of getting these links from being re-indexed?
I have attached an image of what these internal links look like in Google Webmaster Tools.
Thanks, Alan
-
I have seen both sides of the coin, some get affected, most don't.
I prefer to clean it up though and make sure those can't get indexed. I do this as part of our onpage SEO standards. We dont proceed until it's dealt with so it's a high priority.
It's cleaner, gets crawled easily and more efficient. Doesn't hurt
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
-
Links to external site (hotels link)
Hello, I am currently designing the webpages of my website and I am wondering if I should link externally or if it going to hurt me ? I am in the travel industry and for example in the France in the Loire valley, I want to list hotels that people can stay at in pre and pods trip. Is it ok to link to maybe 10 of those hotels websites or can it hurt me ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
URL Errors for SmartPhone in Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools
Howdy all, In recent weeks I have seen a steady increase in the number of smartphone related url errors on Googles Search Console (formerly webmaster tools). THe crawler appears to be searching for a /m/ or /mobile/ directory within the URLs. Why is it doing this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this is for an unresponsive site, would setting the viewport help stop the issue for know until my new responsive site is launched shortly. Cheers fello Mozzers 🙂 Tim NDh1RNs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes1 -
SEO Impact of High Volume Vertical and Horizontal Internal Linking
Hello Everyone - I maintain a site with over a million distinct pages of content. Each piece of content can be thought of like a node in graph database or an entity. While there is a bit of natural hierarchy, every single entity can be related to one or more other entities. The conceptual structure of the entities like so: Agency - A top level business unit ( ~100 pages/urls) Office - A lower level business unit, part of an Agency ( ~5,000 pages/urls) Person - Someone who works in one or more Offices ( ~80,000 pages/urls) Project - A thing one or more People is managing ( ~750,000 pages/urls) Vendor - A company that is working on one or more Projects ( ~250,000 pages/urls) Category - A descriptive entity, defining one or more Projects ( ~1,000 pages/urls) Each of these six entities has a unique (url) and content. For each page/url, there are internal links to each of the related entity pages. For example, if a user is looking at a Project page/url, there will be an internal link to one or more Agencies, Offices, People, Vendors, and Categories. Also, a Project will have links to similar Projects. This same theory holds true for all other entities as well. People pages link to their related Agencies, Offices, Projects, Vendors, etc, etc. If you start to do the math, there are tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links. While our users enjoy the ability to navigate this world according to these relationships, I am curious if we should force a more strict hierarchy for SEO purposes. Essentially, does it make sense to "nofollow" all of the horizontal internal links for a given entity page/url? For search engine indexing purposes, we have legit sitemaps that give a simple vertical hierarchy...but I am curious if all of this internal linking should be hidden via nofollow...? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhariani2 -
Internal page links and possible penalties
If one looks at a page on our client's website, (http://truthbook.com/urantia-book/paper-98-the-melchizedek-teachings-in-the-occident for example), there are a huge amount of links in the body of the page. All internal links are normal links. All external links arerel="nofollow" class="externallink" We have two questions: 1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports? 2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyzig0 -
Limit on Google Removal Tool?
I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How long for Google Webmaster tools to update/reflect link changes
Hi all, Does anyone know or have experience of how long GWMT takes to update its data?, we did some work on our link profile back in October/November but are still seeing old links (removed) showing in GWMT. Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | righty0 -
CMS generating thousands of links, will it hurt my SEO?
I've shifted my static (HTML) eCommerce website to Magento. I am facing serious problem, my website has total 20 products (each product has canonical URL) , I was surprised to see thousands of links indexed in Google as well as in my webmaster Crawler stats, later on I removed all from webmaster tool and marked as fixed, also blocked crawlers to crawl on those specific directories through robots.txt file. Now my question is will these urls still effect my website's SEO? As they still exist and accessible but blocked for crawlers. And is there any better way to block them other than robots.txt.Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarybusinessmachines0