URLs with parameters + canonicals + meta robots
-
Hi Moz community!
I'm posting a new question here as I couldn't find specific answer to the case I'm facing.
Along with canonical tags, we are implementing meta robots on our pages (e-commerce website with thousands of pages). Most of the cases have been covered but I still have one unanswered case:
our products are linked from list pages (mostly categories) but they almost always include a tracking parameter (ie /my-product.html?ref=xxx)
products urls are secured with a canonical tag (referring only to the clean url /my-product.html) but what would be the best solution regarding the meta robots?
For now we opted for a meta robot 'noindex, follow' for non canonical urls (so the ones unfortunately linked from our category/list pages), but I'm afraid that it could hurt our SEO (apparently no juice is given from URLs with a noindex robots), and even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly ...
Would it be best to have no meta robots at all on these product urls with parameters? (we obviously can't have 'index, follow' when the canonical ref points to another url!).
Thanks for your help!
-
Hi Eric,
Thanks for your answer, but as said in my original post, I can't get rid of these URLs because of tracking (these tracking parameters are used all across the website in order to know from where products are the most clicked etc). One of the only spot where the product URLs are 'parameter free' is in the sitemaps xml.
Most of the time, a link from a list page to a product URL will look like /style/cuff-gold/804-item.html?ref=by-shop%3afashion-and-lifestyle%3a, while the 'true' URL is /style/cuff-gold/804-item.html. In order to prevent duplicate content from these tracking codes (I have seen some products being indexed twice or more because of this), the 1st URL has a meta robots 'noindex,follow' and has for canonical the 2nd one (which has a robots 'index, follow').
I just wanted to make sure this could be the best solution in our case (as we unfortunately can't get rid of these tracking codes) in order to have only clean product URLs indexed, and only once!.
-
Jessica, whenever you think of adding a meta robots noindex, follow tag, I prefer to try to determine if you need the page at all on the website. If you're using a canonical tag, then that's fine--but we prefer to remove pages entirely from the site if you're going to use the noindex, follow tag. A page with that tag on it generally doesn't provide any SEO value to the site, it only allows engines to continue to crawl the site.
even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly
When you mention that, the follow tag will actually allow the site to be crawled.If the page on your site is useful for users, then keep it (and use a canonical tag if necessary to prevent duplicate content issues). Otherwise, consider removing the page if you don't want it indexed.
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
-
Meta Description
Hello, For example let say I do hiking tour in different regions and all my pages are presented the same way with the highlights, hotels, what is included, the price, the level and the dates. I guess that across my pages the meta description is going to be the same, the only thing that is going to change is the destination. Is it ok to do it this way ? I know it isn't recommend to do duplicate but in this type of configuration I have no idea on have to do different meta knowing all the pages present the same things. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What to do with parameter urls?
We have a ton of ugly parameter urls that are coming up in google, in semrush, etc. What do we do with them? I know they can cause issues. EX https://www.hibbshomes.com/wp-content/themes/highstand/assets/js/cubeportfolio/js/jquery.cubeportfolio.min.js?ver=6.3
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stldanni0 -
Error Meta Description
(adult website) https://www.google.com.br/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=robertinha Why Google is not reading my description of Yoast plugin? Vídeos de sexo - Vídeos porno
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stroke
www.robertinha.com.br/
Robertinha.com.br. lupa. facebook twitter plus. Página Inicial; Última Atualização: terça, 14 abril 2015. Página Inicial. Categorias. Amadoras (227) · Coroas (6) ... If I site: meusite.com.br work, he read correctly, but the site search not.
I do not understand https://www.google.com.br/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:robertinha.com.br Vídeos de sexo - Vídeos porno
www.robertinha.com.br/
Vídeos de sexo grátis: assista agora mesmo vídeos porno com gatas, gostosas, safadas fazendo muito sexo.0 -
URL Parameters as a single solution vs Canonical tags
Hi all, We are running a classifieds platform in Spain (mercadonline.es) that has a lot of duplicate content. The majority of our duplicate content consists of URL's that contain site parameters. In other words, they are the result of multiple pages within the same subcategory, that are sorted by different field names like price and type of ad. I believe if I assign the correct group of url's to each parameter in Google webmastertools then a lot these duplicate issues will be resolved. Still a few questions remain: Once I set f.ex. the 'page' parameter and i choose 'paginates' as a behaviour, will I let Googlebot decide whether to index these pages or do i set them to 'no'? Since I told Google Webmaster what type of URL's contain this parameter, it will know that these are relevant pages, yet not always completely different in content. Other url's that contain 'sortby' don't differ in content at all so i set these to 'sorting' as behaviour and set them to 'no' for google crawling. What parameter can I use to assign this to 'search' I.e. the parameter that causes the URL's to contain an internal search string. Since this search parameter changes all the time depending on the user input, how can I choose the best one. I think I need 'specifies'? Do I still need to assign canonical tags for all of these url's after this process or is setting parameters in my case an alternative solution to this problem? I can send examples of the duplicates. But most of them contain 'page', 'descending' 'sort by' etc values. Thank you for your help. Ivor
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Redirect 301 or Canonical.
Hello all, I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO. This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115 My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me? 1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical. 2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice. I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name. Thank you verty much, Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalcocer20030 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0 -
Robots.txt unblock
I'm currently having trouble with what appears to be a cached version of robots.txt. I'm being told via errors in my Google sitemap account that I'm denying Googlebot access to the entire site. I uploaded clean and "Allow" robots.txt yesterday, but receive the same error. I've tried "Fetch as Googlebot" on the index and other pages, but still the error. Here is the latest: | Denied by robots.txt |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elchanan
| 11/9/11 10:56 AM | As I said, there in not blocking on the robots.txt for 24 hours. HELP!0