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.
Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?
-
I just got a Mozcrawl back and see lots of errors for overly dynamic urls. The site is a villa rental site that gives users the ability to search by bedroom, amenities, price, etc, so I'm wondering what the best way to keep these types of dynamically generated pages with urls like /property-search-page/?location=any&status=any&type=any&bedrooms=9&bathrooms=any&min-price=any&max-price=any from indexing.
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated : )
-
If you have a page that lists all the villas outside the search results, then you don't lose anything by blocking that folder on the robots.txt
But still, somebody, the guy that wrote the custom theme knows how to do the changes needed.
If you want I can help you with it, for free
Just PM me (I'll need FTP access). -
Having some trouble... Because the site is Wordpress, which dynamically generates pages, there is no /property-search-page/ nor is there a property-search-page.php in the editor files, so the only option I have is to put disallow: /property-search-page/ in the robots.txt file, correct?
-
You guys rock! I'll try these out tomorrow. Thanks a million.
-
If you have a /all-villas/ page then you should go ahead and noindex the search results as Google Guidelines suggests. You can either do it in the /property-search-page/ or using the robots.txt file.
In the robots.txt, add:
disallow: /property-search-page/
The robots method guarantees that no page inside that folder is indexed or even crawled (including /property-search-page/?whatever).
Or on the page /property-search-page/ you can add the meta noindex as such:
Then check if that meta tag is shown in all search results (just check a couple of them).
Hope that works!
-
Yes, it will. Also looks like custom code, it depends on how the header is coded. But it should work. Test it, if you can. This should solve your problems relatively easily. If nothing works, you can always do a robots.txt deny for /property-search-page/?* pages, but that's not a recommended solution. Try the canonical way to see if it works first.
-
We already have Yoast installed, but the errors are still showing up in the Moz report.
To clarify, let's assume we have another page that lists all the villas (/all-villas/). If I go to the property-search-page php file and canonical=rel it to /all-villas/, will it canonical=rel all /property-search-page/?whatever pages to the /all-villas/ page?
-
Well, that will make a little easier from one side and harder from the other.
You can try installing SEO by Yoast, that will put all the canonical tags for you, however, I think it won't link the search result pages to the canonical page that lists them all.
That might require a little coding.
If there's another page, outside /property-search-page/ folder that lists all villas, then you can disallow that folder in the robots.txt file, and that should fix it. If there isn't, well, then you will need to edit the /property-search-page/ page to use a static canonical tag that points to the page that lists all the villas removing any kind of filtering.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
I agree with Federico one hundred percent. Figure out what your primary SEO friendly URLs are for these kinds of pages and canonical them back to that page.
-
I wouldn't put a noindex meta on them, instead I would consider using a canonical tag pointing to the page that lists all the villas.
Anyway, what programming language are you using?
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
-
Include or exclude noindex urls in sitemap?
We just added tags to our pages with thin content. Should we include or exclude those urls from our sitemap.xml file? I've read conflicting recommendations.
Technical SEO | | vcj0 -
How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
Hey Moz, It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis! I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly. Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles. So the situation is this. Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/ Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf So to note, the product ID will always remain the same. Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal. So the potential solution we thought was: we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux. Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input! Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | MH-UK0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Noindex user profile
I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions: What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm. How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive? When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity) (unique) Profile picture (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks or user's own site. Embedded Google Map Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thomasvanderkleij0 -
Best URL format for pagination
We're currently changing the URL format of our website search, we have been discussing a lot and cannot decide the past way to pass the pagination parameter for SEO. We narrowed down to the options. www.website.com/apples/p2 - www.website.com/apples?page=2 - www.website.com/apples/page/2 What would give us best ranking returns? What do you think?
Technical SEO | | HelpSaude0 -
What is the best URL designed for a product page?
Should a product page URL include the category name and subcategory name in it? Most ecommerce platforms it seems are designed to do have the category and sub-category names included in the URL followed by the product name. If that is the case and the same product is listed in more then 1 category and sub-category then will that product have 2 unique urls and as a result be treated as 2 different product pages by google? And then since it is the same product in two places on the site won't google treat those 2 pages as having duplicate content? SO is it best to not have the category and sub-category names in the URL of a product page? And lastly, is there a preferred character limit for a URL to be less than in size? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gallreddy0 -
What is the best way to find stranded pages?
I have a client that has a site that has had a number of people in charge of it. All of these people have very different opinions about what should be on the site itself. When I look at their website on the server I see pages that do not have any obvious navigation to them. What is the best way to find out the internal linking structure of a site and see if these pages truly are stranded?
Technical SEO | | anjonr0 -
How best to redirect URL from expired classified ads?
We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | Donaab0