URL Parameter Handling In GWT to Treat Overindexation - how aggressive?
-
Hi,
My client recently launched a new site and their index went from about 20K up to about 80K - which is a severe over indexation.
I believe this was caused by parameter handling as some category pages now have 700 pages in the results for "site:domain.com/category1" - and apart from the top result, they are all parameters being indexed.
My question is how active/aggressive should I be in blocking these parameters in Google Webmaster Tools? Currently, everything is set to 'let googlebot decide'.
-
Hi! Did these answers take care of your question, or do you still have some questions?
-
Hey There
I would use a robots meta noindex on them (except for the top page of course) and use rel = prev/next to show they are paginated.
I would prefer to do that than use WMT. Also, WMT crawl settings will stop the crawling, but not remove them from the index. Plus, WMT will only handle Google, not other engines like Bing etc. Not that Bing matters, but always better to have a universal solution.
-Dan
-
Hello Search Guys,
Here is some food for thought taken from: http://www.quora.com/Does-Google-limit-the-number-of-pages-it-indexes-for-a-particular-site
Summary:
"Google says they crawl the web in "roughly decreasing PageRank order" and thus, pages that have not achieved widespread link popularity, particularly on large, deep sites, may not be crawled or indexed."
"Indexation
There is no limit to the number of pages Google may index (meaning available to be served in search results) for a site. But just because your site is crawled doesn't mean it will be indexed.Crawl
The ability, speed and depth for which Google crawls your site and retrieves pages can be dependent on a number of factors: PageRank, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, site architecture, status codes and speed.""For a zero-backlink domain with 80.000+ pages, in conjunction with rel=canonical and an xml-sitemap (You do submit a sitemap, don't you?), after submitting the domain to Google for a crawl, a little less than 10k pages remained in index. A few crawls later this was reduced to a mere 250 (very good job on Google's side).
This leads me to believe the indexation cap for a newer site with low to zero pagerank/authority is around 10k."
Another interesting article: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2062851/Google-Upping-101K-Page-Index-Limit
Hope this helps, and easy response is to limit crawling to the most needed pages as aggressive as possible to remove the unneeded links leaving only needed ones
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
-
Internal Links - Different URLs
Hey so, In my product page, I have recommended products at the bottom. The issue is that those recommended products have long parameters such as sitename.com/product-xy-z/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs The reason why it has that long parameter is due to tracking purposes (internally with the dev and UX team). My question is, should I replace it with the clean URL or as long as it has the canonical tag, it should be okay to have such a long parameter? I would think clean URL would help with internal links and what not...but if it already has a canonical tag would it help? Another issue is that the URL is different and not just the parameter. For instance..the canonical URL is sitename.com/productname-xyz/ and so the internal link used on the product page (same exact page just different URL with parameter) sitename.com/xyz/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs (missing product name), BUT still has the canonical tag!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
How would you handle this duplicate content - noindex or canonical?
Hello Just trying look at how best to deal with this duplicated content. On our Canada holidays page we have a number of holidays listed (PAGE A)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/north-america/canada/suggested-holidays.aspx We also have a more specific Arctic Canada holidays page with different listings (PAGE B)
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/arctic-and-antarctica/arctic-canada/suggested-holidays.aspx Of the two, the Arctic Canada page (PAGE B) receives a far higher number of visitors from organic search. From a user perspective, people expect to see all holidays in Canada (PAGE A), including the Arctic based ones. We can tag these to appear on both, however it will mean that the PAGE B content will be duplicated on PAGE A. Would it be the best idea to set up a canonical link tag to stop this duplicate content causing an issue. Alternatively would it be best to no index PAGE A? Interested to see others thoughts. I've used this (Jan 2011 so quite old) article for reference in case anyone else enters this topic in search of information on a similar thing: Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical - SEO Tips0 -
Mixing static.htm urls and dynamic urls on a Windows IIS Server?
Hi all, We've had a website originally built using static html with .htm extensions ranking well in Google hence we want to keep those pages/urls. We are on a dedicated sever (Windows IIS). However our developer has custom made a new DYNAMIC section for the site which shows new added products dynamically and allows them to be booked online via shopping cart. We are having problems displaying them both on the same domain even if we put the dynamic section withing its own subfolder and keep the static htms in the root. Is it possible to have both function on IIS (even if they may have to function a little separately)? Does anyone have previous experience of this kind of issue or a way of making both work? What setup do we need to do on the dedicated server.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
What URL parameter settings in GWT to choose for search results parameter?
Hello,we're about to disallow search results from crawling in robots.txt, but in GWT we have to specify URL parameters. URLs with 'search' parameter look like these: http://www.example.com/?search=keyword So in GWT we're setting the following parameter: search Question, what settings to set for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poiseo0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Repeat name and location in URL or no ?
in this url www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca, is it a good thing to repeat the name and location in the url but with ''-''sign between? ex: www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca/partsandservice/stjerome-mitsubishi-contact.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPilon0 -
Indexed non existent pages, problem appeared after we 301d the url/index to the url.
I recently read that if a site has 2 pages that are live such as: http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/ will come up as duplicate if they are both live... I read that it's best to 301 redirect the http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. I read that this helps avoid duplicate content and keep all the link juice on one page. We did the 301 for one of our clients and we got about 20,000 errors that did not exist. The errors are of pages that are indexed but do not exist on the server. We are assuming that these indexed (nonexistent) pages are somehow linked to the http://www.url.com/index The links are showing 200 OK. We took off the 301 redirect from the http://www.url.com/index page however now we still have 2 exaact pages, www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. What is the best way to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0