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    4. How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?

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    How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • footsteps
      footsteps last edited by

      Hi All,

      We have a crawler problem on one of our sites www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl.

      On this site, visitors can specify criteria to filter available products. These filters are passed as http/get arguments. The number of possible filter urls is virtually limitless.

      In order to prevent duplicate content, or an insane amount of pages in the search indices, our software automatically adds noindex, nofollow and noarchive directives to these filter result pages. However, we’re unable to explain to crawlers (Google in particular) to ignore these urls.

      We’ve already changed the on page filter html to javascript, hoping this would cause the crawler to ignore it. However, it seems that Googlebot executes the javascript and crawls the generated urls anyway.

      What can we do to prevent Google from crawling all the filter options?

      Thanks in advance for the help.

      Kind regards,

      Gerwin

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • footsteps
        footsteps @alexhoug last edited by

        The following is added to our robots.txt .. now lets wait and see the results

        User-agent: * Disallow: /admin/
        Disallow: /?
        Allow /?product_date=&product_date2=*
        Disallow /?product_date=&product_date2=&

        To check the working of the robots.txt i found a handy website;

        http://phpweby.com/services/robots

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • footsteps
          footsteps @alexhoug last edited by

          The url looks like this;

          http://www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl/herensneakers?product_brand=

          So just adding;

          User-agent: *
          Disallow: /*?product_brand

          Should do the trick?
          Most important is that herensneakers itself should be indexed, followed and crawled

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • alexhoug
            alexhoug last edited by

            I would use your robots.txt file to prevent them from crawling the specific strings / pages. Go into your Google Webmaster Tools and you can see all the information Google has on your site and any issues, you can also specify robots.txt information in there. That would be the best route as Google is obedient with what is on the robots.txt file. If you want more information about robots.txt, go here.

            footsteps 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
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