Layered navigation and hiding nav from user agent

[Kyle_M]

I am trying to deal with the duplicate content issues presented by Magento's layered navigation feature (aka faceted navigation). I installed Amasty's Improved Navigation extension (https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html) and it offers the option to hide the layered navigation from specific user agents (ie googlebot, bingbot, etc).

This seems like cloaking to me and I hesitate to try it, unless hiding faceted navigation from specific user agents is known to be acceptable to Google (white hat practice). Does anyone know if this the case?

[Kyle_M]

Great, thanks Carson! You're insights have been very helpful. I think we'll try to make the on-page ajax solution work.

[Carson-Ward]

If you're really worried about indexation I think that's a fine solution. It's definitely easier to manage, and it'll also be easier to track pageviews in most analytics platforms. The only downside is that if someone emails or links to a category page with filters applied the recipient won't see it. But generally people share products and not category pages, so it's not a big deal. I'd probably go that route.

Also make sure that your category pages still update the URL when you go to page 2, or that page 2 is somehow also being indexed. You don't want products that don't get indexed because categories can't be crawled.

[Kyle_M]

Thanks for the link! I can see how Google offers me a way to tell it how to use my site variables. It seems like between managing parameters in webmaster tools, using canonical links and adding meta noindex tags on variable pages, there should be enough to keep things in order with the search engines. And I can just assume Google knows not to waste too much crawl budget on the variable pages.

I was considering one other option that would remove concerns about variables altogether. Using a different extension, I can set up Magento's layered navigation to work on the page without updating the URL. This eliminates the need for canonicals, parameters, and everything else that is more in Google's control than mine. What do you think of that as a solution?

[Carson-Ward]

Yes, the bots will crawl the pages, but they will not INDEX them.

There is a concern there, but mostly if the bots get caught in some kind of crawl trap - where they're trying out a near-infinite set of variables and getting stuck in a loop. Otherwise the spiders should understand the variables. You can actually check it in Webmaster tools to make sure Google understands. Instructions for that here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en

Ultimately Google will definitely not penalize you for having lots of duplicate content on URLs through variables, but it might be an issue with Googlebot not finding all your pages. You can make sure that doesn't happen by checking the indexation of your sitemap.

You could also try to block any URLs with the URL parameter in robots.txt. Make sure you get some help on the RegEx if you plan to do this. My advice is that blocking the variables in robots.txt is not worth it, as Google should have no problems with the variables - especially if the canonical tags are working.

Googlebot at least is smart enough these days to know when to stop crawling variable pages, so I think there are more important on-site things to worry about. Make sure your categories are linked to and optimized, for example.

[Kyle_M]

This gets into an issue of bots and crawling where I am less clear. Even with canonicals, don't search engine bots crawl all of the pages produced with faceted navigation? That will easily reach 10,000+ pages on my site, which currently has a total number of pages in the low hundreds.  I was under the impression I don't want to set up the faceted navigation in a way where the bots crawl through every combination of pages created by my products' attribute filters and bog the bots down in a quagmire of low-value pages. But I'm not sure if that's the case or how concerned I need to be about the bots spending their time on those pages.

[Carson-Ward]

If I'm not mistaken Magento has canonical tags on category pages by default, so you might be trying to solve an issue that doesn't exist. Take a look at the source code on faceted navigation to confirm. Or you can send me the site and I'll look over it.