Ecommerce filter views, URLs and the SEO implications

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi,

I'm dealing with an ecommerce client who sells furniture. Each category landing page has a menu on the left hand side that allows you filter by colour, material, brand etc.

Take the www.example/double-beds page, as an example: if you select 'Wood' from the 'Material' filter, the URL changes to www.example/Category/Browse?PageNumber=&ViewAs=&ObjectEntityKey=1916&PageSize=15&SortBy=&filterOptions=47&filterOptions=47 and all the wooden double beds are displayed.

As this new URL contains some of the same products/content as www.example.com/double-beds, where do we stand from an SEO/duplicate content point of view? Are we at risk of a duplicate content slap?

Cheers,

Lewis

[MonicaOConnor]

You can set up Canonical tags in your template. Usually the default is to canonical the page's URL, but if you create the canonical tag to the main page, you should be ok. It will help reduce duplicate content and tell google that you want them to pay attention to the content and structure of your main page.

I would also set parameters in GWT, this will help reduce errors, like 404 errors if product options change in the future. When you are using dynamic URL structure like this, it also helps Google understand and read them better. I would implement both of these changes. Depending on what platform you are in, you should be able to export the URLs to easily import the canonical tags.

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi Andy,

It's a new site (launched last Friday) and, luckily, the offending URLs have not been indexed yet! It appears that all of the affected page URLs start with www.example.com/category/browse - so a rule to noindex,nofollow all of these should work!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Lewis,

Am I right in assuming that you have templates within your ecommerce system? If so, you could identify which one powers these pages, and as long as no others are affected, then you could just add it to this one.

You can disallow via the robots.txt, but this isn't the same as a noindex. If you were to disallow access to a URL that was already indexed and then changed this to a noindex, you would find Google can't access the page to honour the noindex. Messy business!

I'm not even sure you can achieve this via the .htacess file as it might catch more than you require.

-Andy

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the response.

I was thinking we could noindex,nofollow, but how would we do this without figuring out every single URL it affects? There are obviously hundreds (thousands?) of combinations, and going through this manually will be a huge investment of time.

Cheers,

Lewis

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Lewis,

As this new URL contains some of the same products/content as www.example.com/double-beds, where do we stand from an SEO/duplicate content point of view? Are we at risk of a duplicate content slap?

This is very possible. At any point if duplicate content is seen, there is a chance of it counting towards a penalty.

However, I am assuming that the long search results are not intended for the search engines? You could happily noindex,nofollow all of these and remove the issue altogether.

-Andy