Product sorting and dynamic urls
-
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
-
I see, thank you.
-
Thank you for the details.
-
Thank you, I was guessing that might be the thing to do.
-
Yes rel canonical is an option too - BUT please be sure to do it correctly if you have pagination. Don't point page 2, page 3 etc back at page 1...
So you should end up with canonical's like this:
or
or
etc
-
James is absolutely correct.This is a SEO issue, and you do need to address it. I would like to add a bit more clarification.
Let's say you have a page that shows sweaters. You can sort that page by the metrics you indicated. When that happens you have various pages as follows:
mysite.com/sweaters?sort=price&dir=asc
mysite.com/sweaters?sort=price&dir=desc
mysite.com/sweaters?sort=name&dir=asc
If you have no sort options, then you have 1 sweater page. If you have 7 sort options, you have 15 sweater pages. Which one should google index? Customer #1 links to the page sorted by price, meanwhile customer #2 links to the page sorted alphabetically. Google doesn't know what to do...unless you tell them.
All the various pages should be canonicalized. Each of these pages should contain a line of code in their header similar to:
That tag tells search engines that the original URL is the one you wish indexed in search engines, and that all the various pages offering different sort orders are copies of the original page.
-
Yes, you should fix it. Make sure that only one version of that page is indexed - presumably the one that a user first sees before sorting/filtering/etc. When I say one version though, I really mean one version for each category, and don't forget paging - let the SE's index each page.
Just hide all the sorting/filtering versions, the best method is to add a noindex, follow meta tag
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
-
City Name in URL structure
I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
My website is being opened by multiple URLs?
Dear Friends, I have a website which is being opened like example.comand example/index to same page. Is there any problem SEO point of view. By the way I have placed the Rel= canonical tag in source page. its working fine but
On-Page Optimization | | docbeans0 -
How to transfer old WP blog to new URL
I have a 9 year old WP website with a WP blog which is still getting 300+ new visitors a day even though I have not written a blog for 5 years and have not updated content. Some posts have over 25,000 links. However the Moz analytics is fraught with significant errors-404 redirects, page not found, dup content, no metatags, title too long etc. I was totally inexperienced 5 years ago and made many errors. However the basic content was sound and still is producing new visitors. I am starting a new ecommerce website using the same name but the URL and server will be different. I want to transfer my WP blog to the new site. I am concerned however that bringing the posts over can create the same errors on the new site. If I update all of the blogs on the old site using Yoast before transferring the blog to the new site will that help. I suppose I could check those flagged dup content and only transfer one of that category?
On-Page Optimization | | wianno1680 -
Product page reviews issues
Hi, We've implemented pagination on the reviews with rel=next/prev, but have seen no improvements since this. An example page with reviews is here. Can you see any issues on this that would be causing the problem? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pikka0 -
Title tag and URL Optimization
Hello guys, Should the URL reflect the structure of the title of a webpage? This is the old title with the Url: 20mm O/D Black Polypropylene LSZH Flexible Conduit 100m Coil /Product/20mm-o-d-black-polypropylene-lszh-conduit-100m-coil/1352 I changed the keyword position and it looks like this: 20mm Flexible Conduit | O/D Black Polypropylene LSZH | 100m I kept the same Url for now, should I change that too? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Number ID's in URL's
If you have to place a number ID into a URL. Does it matter from an seo perspective whether it is placed in the middle or at the end? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | simmo2350 -
Numbers in URL's - Search friendly or not?
Hi Mozzers, I have a client who has just launched a new website and we are having difficulties in making the URL's search friendly. I wont get into the technical aspects, but I'll explain the potential solutions the developers have given me. current: www.site.com/en/product/browse-by-product/37/22 Where 'en' stands for the English version of the website, 37 is the product category for example 'hard drives', and 22 is the product name or example 'seagate' Option to fix; www.site.com/en/p/product/hard-drives-37/seagate-22 This optional fix reduces the word product down to p, reduces 'browse by product' to 'product' and inserts the category and product names. Note the category identifier '37' has to be included in the URL, and the product identifier '22' also has to be in the URL. Obviously this is not great, but it is required at the moment. Best case scenario would be to have the URL like this... www.site.com/en/hard-drives/seagate So my question is, how far off the best case scenario is the option to fix? Scale of 1 to 10 would be good?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeyDorrington0 -
URL length does it really make a difference
I am currently working redevloping my site, I have terribly long URL's according to SEOMoz, can someone cover the real benefit of my editing my URLs, and then putting in all of those redirects. Should I edit old material? My site has been in wordpressformat for a couple of years now.
On-Page Optimization | | copykatrecipes0