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.
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
-
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
-
One step at a time = long term success. I wish you the best with it Jordan.
-
Thanks Alan, you are right this site has quite a long way to go. The first crawl was just finished and I notice that the most errors were due to dupe content so I decided I would try and tackle that first. Thank you for all the pointers, I will be taking a look at all those as soon as I can.
-
Totally agree with Alan, it can cause circular navigation problems for crawlers too.
-
Jordan,
Others might have a different view, however that's exactly what I recommend to clients. but only if you've got other html link based ways for bots to get to all the content in a direct manner, and have a good sitemap.xml file to reinforce that.
I am happy to see that you have a sound overall site architecture, however I see no robots.txt file at your root so I'm not sure what's up with that. Also your sitemap.xml file only has 43 URLs in it. that's a problem not because google can't find content by other means, it's just that I've found Google likes that reinforcement, and Bing especially does a better job discovering content with a proper sitemap.xml submitted through their webmaster system (they're less efficient at discovering content by other means).
I'd also suggest you have a big push ahead in dealing with near-duplicate content.
For example:
http://www.durafaucet.com/mk850-orb.html
http://www.durafaucet.com/kitchen-faucets/mk850.html
Sure, these are unique products. Except there's already so little unique content on either page that the common content compounded by the site-wide replication of top, sidebar and footer content means the total weight of uniqueness is on the very minor end of the spectrum.
And then there's the issue of a complete lack of inbound link authority - OpenSiteExplorer.org might be wrong, but currently shows almost no inbound links. Not only will you need inbound links to the home page, but also to as many inner pages as is realistic in terms of implementation capabilities go. This is especially true for category level pages. (including a variety of inbound link anchor text - brand, domain, keyword phrase and generic text).
So if you don't address those type of issues, removing all the dupes that show up in search now won't result in as much long-term value as you'll need.
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
-
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Robots.txt Syntax for Dynamic URLs
I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
Technical SEO | | btreloar
Disallow: ?Page=
Disallow: ?Page=*
Disallow: ?Page=
Or something else?0 -
How to: Sub headings appears in google results
I notice that many sites have sub headings appearing below their google results. http://i.imgur.com/A5JxMKD.png
Technical SEO | | kevinbp
See image for example. Q: what are these called? and how do we get them? A5JxMKD.png1 -
How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
Technical SEO | | wplodge0 -
Should I block Map pages with robots.txt?
Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Technical SEO | | imaginex0 -
"Search Box Optimization"
A client of ours recently received en email from a random SEO "company" claiming they could increase website traffic using a technique known as "search box optimization". Essentially, they are claiming they can insert a company name into the autocomplete results on Google. Clearly, this isn't a legitimate service - however, is it a well known technique? Despite our recommendation to not move forward with it, the client is still very intrigued. Here is a video of a similar service:
Technical SEO | | McFaddenGavender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW2Fz6dy1_A0 -
No indexing url including query string with Robots txt
Dear all, how can I block url/pages with query strings like page.html?dir=asc&order=name with robots txt? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | HMK-NL0