Help Crawl friendliness for large site
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After watching Rand's video I am trying to think of the best way to make my large site more crawl friendly.
Background
I have a large site with over 100k product skus and so when you get to a particular page of products there are tons of different refinements and options that help you sort the products. Most of these are noindex followed, but I was wondering if I should be nofollowing the internal links as well in order to keep bots out of those pages and going to the pages that I want them to go too. Is this a good way to handle it?
Also, does anyone have good recommendations of links to posts that deal with helping the crawl friendliness of a large site?
Thanks!
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Good point. If you don't want the filter pages crawled at all, it would be better to just block them via robots.txt. My preferred approach is to use query parameters for filters, and canonicaling the filtered pages back to the original, unfiltered page.
Another approach is to use AJAX to dynamically filter the page. This takes more programming overhead, but won't result in tons of extra pages being crawled and potentially indexed.
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Nofollowing internal links is almost never a good idea. You're just wasting valuable link juice.
Google actually just recently came out with a good guide for how to handle ecommerce navigation with lots of product options: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html
Also, if you have a lot of categories in you store, try to show navigation that is only relevant to the section of the store the user is in. For example, if the user is in the Flowers section, don't show a ton of links for Cellphones.
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