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.
Can using nofollow on magento layered navigation hurt?
-
Howdy Mozzers!
We would like to use no follow, no index on our magento layered navigation pages after any two filters are selected. (We are using single filter pages as landing page, so we would liked them indexed)
Is it ok to use nofollow, noindex on these filter pages? Are there disadvantages of using nofollow on internal pages?
Matt mentioned refraining from using nofollow internally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8
But we would like to conserve crawling bandwidth and PR flow on potentially 100's of thousands of irrelevant/duplicate filter pages.
-
I understand I might be a little late, but I had experienced this issue first hand with a Magento site. Once I added a wildcard exclusion in the robots.txt file my impressions and click improved noticeably.
-
HI,
That is quite a few pages!
If the main issue is crawling related then robots.txt is probably the best way to go, I think the meta tags will still allow the pages to be crawled (they have to be for the tag to be read). Check out the comments in this and this post for wildcard matching in robots.txt which should do what you need. If the pages are indexed then it might be wise to leave a bit of time so that the noindex tags are picked up and then implement the crawl blocking in the robots.txt (and test in GWT to make sure you are not accidentally blocking more then you think). In this case I think you could still leave out the nofollow meta tag but this might just be personal opinion now - I'm not sure if in practice it would make much difference once you have no indexed and blocked crawling!
-
Hi Lynn,
Thank you for your valuable input on the matter. Yes, using meta tags in the header. We are currently submitting filter pages that we want indexed through the site map, so google bot should be able to reach these pages. Also, we are displaying noindex, nofollow tags only on filter pages which have a combination of more than two filters selected as we do not need to go any deeper than that.
I understand your point of using noindex, follow instead of noindex, nofollow to prevent unexpected crawl issues. But on the contrary, don't you think we could conserve crawling bandwidth using noindex, nofollow tags on filter pages that serve no purpose being crawled and probably wont be externally linked to either?
We currently have around 7 filters, some with many values. This can create combinations of more than 500,000 filter pages...
Thanks
-
Hi,
I assume you mean in a meta header tag for these pages? As a general rule I would avoid using nofollow and simply noindex the pages in question. If you are implementing this with a meta tag then the pages will be reached from the layered navigation links anyway so they would then be a dead end for both PR and the crawler - with the potential to cause unexpected crawl problems rather than optimising it.
As long as you are addressing as best you can any duplicate content issues caused by the layered navigation (check out this post for a good rundown on the various solutions) then I would leave the noindex in place and let the crawler follow the links as normal.
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
-
Are there any downsides to using a canonical tag temporarily?
I'm working on redesigning our website. One of the content types has a main archive page (/success-stories) containing all of the success stories (written by graduates of our program). Because we plan to have success stories for other people (non-graduates), I'm using category hierarchies (/success-stories/graduates and success-stories/nonprofits, for example). It will go one level deeper to organize graduates by graduation year (/success-stories/graduates/%year%). I think this will work out well. However, we won't have non-graduate success stories for a little while, probably at least a few weeks, which means that /success-stories and /.../graduates indices will contain the same content for a while. So my question is this: Will it hurt to use a canonical tag that points to /success-stories/graduates as the authority until the main archive page contains more than just graduates? Or would it be better to use a 302 redirect from /success-stories to /.../graduates until more diverse content is added?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcaples0 -
Can I use two sitemaps?
I have a Magento website. I am going to add a Wordpress blog under /blog. If I setup each with its own webmaster tools to submit a sitemap does it hurt anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
What can Google tell about a website from Chrome or its toolbar?
Besides crawling with a bot, what kind of info about site construction, html, etc does Google get via users via alternate methods? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945011 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!0 -
Using Reg Ex to 301 old categories and query strings in Magento
Hi SEOmoz community! I'm hoping somebody with a little Magento and Reg Ex knowledge will be able to help me out here. I need to 301 some old categories along with their old query strings. Below is an example. Old URL /bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html Users can then filter by price or range which then creates a query string such as... /bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html?price=1%2C10 New URL: /bed-linen/pillowcases.html So the new query string will be /bed-linen/pillowcases.html?price=1%2C10 Does anybody know the Reg Ex to 301 this? Can this be done in Magento re-write module or by htaccess only? Thanks in advance 🙂 Anthony @Anthony_Mac85
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
How would you use this broken link building opportunity?
I've found a good opportunity to build some links and I'd love your opinions on my options here. There's a big event that happens once a year in my city. Let's say the event used to have a website called www.CityEvent.com. The event decided not to use this website anymore, but instead to put all of their event information on their facebook page. It looks like they let their domain name expire and someone else snapped it up. It's now sitting as an empty wordpress blog with one line of text. This empty website has 1300 links pointing to it. I can see two opportunities here: 1. Write a very thorough article on my website (that I am trying to build links to) describing the event and giving people all of the information that they need to know about it. (The amount of information on the Facebook page is minimal.) or 2. Create a new website called www.EventCity.com and put up a static page with all of the information that people need to know. There would be a link on this page pointing to the site that I am trying to rank. In both cases there would be much more information than is available on the Facebook page including a collection of youtube videos about the event and many helpful links for people who are interested in this type of event. Then the plan is to contact the sites who are linking to the dead page and invite them to link to my new page (either on my site or the new site that I could create). I see a few pros and cons to each method. For option #2 I think people would be more likely to link to a more official looking page rather than an article on a separate website. (My website has information about the city in question but is not closely related to the event at all.) However, I would only be getting one link back to my site. One negative to this is that the actual organizers of the event may not be pleased that someone has created an official looking page. But then again, perhaps they would be happy to have a free website. For option #1 I would possibly get more links from sites that are authoritative in my city that point directly to the site I am trying to rank. However, people would be less likely to link to us because we are not an official site for the event, but simply a very good article about the event. There are no other good articles for this event that are ranking on Google. Hopefully that makes sense. What would you do? EDIT - Just thought of a third option - try to buy the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Canonical & noindex? Use together
For duplicate pages created by the "print" function, seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not) and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1