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
-
I'm struggling to understand (and fix) why I'm getting a 404 error. The URL includes this "%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D" but I cannot find that anywhere in the referring URL. Does anyone know why please? Thanks
Can you help with how to fix this 404 error please? It appears that I have a redirect from one page to the other, although the referring page URL works, but it appears to be linking to another URL with this code at the end of the the URL - %5Bnull%20id=43484%5D that I'm struggling to find and fix. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Best way to handle 301 redirects on a business directory
We work with quite a few sites that promote retail traders and feature a traders' directory with pages for each of the shops (around 500 listings in most cases). As retail strips, shops come and go all the time, so I get a lot of pages that are removed as the business is no longer present. Currently I've been doing 301 redirects to the home page of the directory if you try to access a deleted trader page, but this means a ever growing htaccess file with thousands of 301 redirects. Are we handling this the best way or is there a better way to tackle this situation?
Technical SEO | | Assemblo0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
How should I close my forum in a way that's best for SEO?
Hi Guys, I have a forum on a subdomain and it is no longer used. (like forum.mywebsite.com) It kind of feels like a dead limb and I don't know what's best to do for SEO. Should I just leave it as it is and let it stagnate? There is a link in the nav menu to the main domain so users have a chance to find the main domain. Or should I remove it and just redirect the whole subdomain to the main domain? I don't know if redirects would work as I doubt most of the threads would match our articles, plus there are 700 of them. The main domain is PR3 and so is the forum subdomain. Please help!
Technical SEO | | HCHQ0 -
Changing URL of posts
HI, I need to change the urls and permalink structure of my blogposts. How I have to deal all this with google? Do I have to re-submit the pages to google with fetch as google? Will google display duplicate content of the same article ( having changed the url) or will it automatically replace the old url with the new ones? Tx for your support guys!
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site
Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh
Technical SEO | | MyFairyTaleBooks0 -
Which is The Best Way to Handle Query Parameters?
Hi mozzers, I would like to know the best way to handle query parameters. Say my site is example.com. Here are two scenarios. Scenario #1: Duplicate content example.com/category?page=1
Technical SEO | | jombay
example.com/category?order=updated_at+DESC
example.com/category
example.com/category?page=1&sr=blog-header All have the same content. Scenario #2: Pagination example.com/category?page=1
example.com/category?page=2 and so on. What is the best way to solve both? Do I need to use Rel=next and Rel=prev or is it better to use Google Webmaster tools parameter handling? Right now I am concerned about Google traffic only. For solving the duplicate content issue, do we need to use canonical tags on each such URL's? I am not using WordPress. My site is built on Ruby on Rails platform. Thanks!0 -
How to change URL of RSS Feed?
Hi, There are some websites that keeps on scraping my content. I have blocked them already from accessing my website using .htaccess but they still get my content via RSS feed. I have tried delaying the RSS feed but I think this affected google rankings. My question is, is there a way to change the URL of my RSS Feed? From: http://www.mysite.com/feed to http://www.mysite.com/feed2
Technical SEO | | Trigun0