Googlebot indexing URL's with ? queries in them. Is this Panda duplicate content?
-
I feel like I'm being damaged by Panda because of duplicate content as I have seen the Googlebot on my site indexing hundreds of URL's with ?fsdgsgs strings after the .html. They were beign generated by an add-on filtering module on my store, which I have since turned off. Googlebot is still indexing them hours later. At a loss what to do. Since Panda, I have lost a couple of dozen #1 rankings that I've held for months on end and had one drop over 100 positions.
-
Thanks for all that. Really valuable information. I have gone to Parameter handing and there were 54 parameters listed. In total, generating over 20 million unnecessary URLs. I nearly died when I saw it. We have 6,000 genuine pages and 20 million shitty ones that don't need to be indexed. Thankfully, I'm upgrading next week and I have turned the feature off on the current site, the new one won't have that feature. Phew.
I have changed the settings for these parameters that were already listed in Webmaster tools, and now I wait for the biggest re-index in history LOL!
I have submitted a sitemap now and as I rewrite page titles & meta descriptions, I'm using the Fetch as Google tool to ask for resubmission. It's been a really valuable lesson, and I'm just thankful that I wasn't hit worse than I was. Now, it's a waiting game.
Of my 6,000 URLs' on the site map submitted a couple of days ago, around 1/3 of them have been indexed. When I first uploaded it, only 126 of them were.
-
The guys here are all correct - you can handle these in WMT with parameter handling, but as every piece of text about parameter handling states, handle with care. You can end up messing things up big-time if you block areas of the site you do want crawled.
You'll also have to wait days / longer for Google to acknowledge the changes and reflect these in its index and in WMT.
If it's an option, look at using the canonical tag to self-reference: this means that if the CMS creates multiple pages with the same file on different URLs, they'll all point back to the original URL.
-
"They were beign generated by an add-on filtering module on my store, which I have since turned off. Googlebot is still indexing them hours later."
Google will continue to index them, until you tell them specifically not to do so. Go to GWT, and resubmit a sitemap containing only the URL's you want them to index. Additionally, do a "fetch as Google" on the same pages as your sitemap. This can help to speed up the "reindex" process.
Also, hours? LMAO it will take longer than that. Unless you are a huge site that gets crawled hourly, it can take days, if not weeks for those URL's to disappear. I'm thinking longer since it does not sound like you have redirected those links, just turned off the plugin that was used to create them. Depending on how your store is set up, and how many pages you have, it may be wise to 301 all the offending pages to their proper destination URL.
-
Check out parameter exclusion options in Webmaster Tools. You can tell the search engines to ignore these appended parameters.
-
Use a spidering tool to check out all of the links from your site, such as Screaming Frog.
Also check your XML & HTML Site Maps doesn't have old links.
Hope this helps
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
-
Duplicate content in sidebar
Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Duplicate Content on our own website
Our website sells tickets for events. We also have an news articles section with information about events / artists / venues. From time to time we release a product page and a related news article on a separate page. Some of the content in the news article would be perfect for our product page. Essentially its our product page we want too rank. Would it harm our SEO if we had some of the same content on both of these pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate content, is it ever ok?
I am building a large site for a client who sells physical products. I am using WordPress as my CMS (as a piece of background information). There are a few products that need to be listed in the sites hierarchy in multiple locations as such: Parent A Child 1 Parent B Child 2 Child 3 Parent C Child 1 I am concerned that having a product exist in multiple instances will cause indexing problems for that product. I can't be the only person to come across this issue, would love some feedback on the best practices for such an issue. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Qcmny0 -
Help With Duplicated Content
Hi Moz Community, I am having some issue's with duplicated content, i recently removed the .html from all of our links and moz has reported it as being duplicated. I have been reading up about Canonicalization and would to verify some details, when using the canonical tag would it be placed in the /mywebpage.html or /mywebpage file? I am having a hard time to sort this out so any help from you SEO experts would be great 🙂 I have also updated my htaccess file with the following Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | finelinewebsolutions0 -
Why isn't our site being shown on the first page of Google for a query using the exact domain, when its pages are indeed indexed by Google
When I type our domain.com as a query into Google, I only see one of our pages on the homepage, and it's in 4th position. It seems though, that all pages of the site are indexed by google when I type in the query "site:domain.com". There was an issue at the site launch, where the robots.txt file was left active for around two weeks. Would this have been responsible for the fact that another domain ranks #1 when we type in our own domain? It has been around a couple of months now since the site was launched. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Does schema.org assist with duplicate content concerns
The issue of duplicate content has been well documented and there are lots of articles suggesting to noindex archive pages in WordPress powered sites. Schema.org allows us to mark-up our content, including marking a components URL. So my question simply, is no-indexing archive (category/tag) pages still relevant when considering duplicate content? These pages are in essence a list of articles, which can be marked as an article or blog posting, with the url of the main article and all the other cool stuff the scheme gives us. Surely Google et al are smart enough to recognise these article listings as gateways to the main content, therefore removing duplicate content concerns. Of course, whether or not doing this is a good idea will be subjective and based on individual circumstances - I'm just interested in whether or not the search engines can handle this appropriately.
On-Page Optimization | | MarkCA0 -
Duplicate content in the title
Good morning, I am developing an application that searches offers in the press. The problem I have is the follow one:
On-Page Optimization | | ofuente
When I find an offer that I have already post, I cant use the same URL because it generates duplicate content , as the URL is generated from the title. If I find two offers in different stores (for example Thomson TV) I am studying two options. The first would be to add a number at the end of the URL
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson1
http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson2 Another option I propose would be to add semantic data to provide value (such as the date). For example:
http://www.offertazo.com/01-12-12/televisor-thomson I appreciate your help.0 -
Number of characters to duplicate content
I wonder how much characters in a page title so it can be characterized for Googleas duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | imoveiscamposdojordao
Sorry for the English, I used Google Translator.
I'm from Brazil 😄
Thanks.0