Help with facet URLs in Magento
-
Hi Guys,
Wondering if I can get some technical help here...
We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout.
These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process.
Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example,
http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19
Canonical to...
http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html
Which I understand to be incorrect.
As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution?
As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series.
Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black )
But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior?
My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls.
Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter.
Thanks
-
Hi Lewis,
Firstly thank you for taking your time to respond in depth to my question.
Since reading your response, I have done the following...
Identified the parameters that should NOT be indexed, these are; 'brand=', 'min=' and 'max='
The colour filter 'colour=' is to be kept indexed. I have reviewed the website and found that users cannot currently select to filter more than on colour, which eliminates Google from indexing multiple colour filters in one URL.
However, users can still filter by colour and brand, hence why I have requested ours devs to meta noindex any URL that contains the 'brand=' parameter as well as any URLs that have the 'min/max=' parameters as these are price filters.
I have also requested rel=next/prev to be implemented correctly.
The above should drastically reduce our indexed content.
As well as this, I have added the following parameters into Search Consoles' URL Parameter tool as 'No Crawl', 'brand, min, max' - although I understand this is not a guaranteed fix, it was my first option with no immediate dev time over the weekend.
Now the only URLs in need of a canonical is the colour filtered URLs as 'brand, min max' are all noindex. I have asked dev to ensure the canonical points back to page 1 for now, however I am looking into a view-all page option so the canonical would point to that.
A good learning curve all of this!
-
There is a big difference between robots.txt and no index
"Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black )
But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior?"
See http://i.imgur.com/114BHcR.png
You need to use a no index tag not robots.txt ideally with a secular canonical pointing to the product.
Please see references one and two below. There are larger versions of the photos below as well
You need to run your site through deep crawl and or screaming frog SEO spider If you would be kind enough to give me the URL privately or publicly I will run a deep crawl and SEO spider
** This topic is difficult to explain without using the ability to show videos and images inside the box while describing this. That's why I recommend you view this YouTube video and slide share.**
Deep crawl is fantastic at solving these issues it has done this for other magenta clients of mine, and I strongly recommend utilizing what you've learned from that webinar and the other references below.
please see one and two below
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/webinars/masterclass-webinar-faceted-navigation-for-seo/
- https://www.stonetemple.com/seo-tags-virtual-keynote-with-gary-illyes-and-eric-enge/
-
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html
-
https://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck
-
http://searchengineland.com/google-offers-advice-faceted-navigation-infinite-scroll-web-pages-184232
larger versions of the images
I agree with Lewis's recommendation for an extension and have added a couple more.
- http://www.mageworx.com/magento-2-seo-extension.html
- https://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/ultimate-seo-suite.html
- https://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-2-extensions/layered-navigation
I Hope this helps,
Thomas
78tExl8.png nMrYeUWlslY xJeFTbY.jpg wOHxaEE.jpg QprPUyk.jpg 114BHcR.png
-
Hi!
We do a lot of consultancy for Magento projects and this is a question that comes up quite regularly as it can't really be handled perfectly straight out of the box with Magento.
Every implementation is a little bit different, but I'll put together some recommendations below based on the information available at the moment.
For your faceted navigation, you ideally don't want to index any of these pages, unless you believe that you'll rank in your own right for specific filters (e.g. Colour, like you pointed out in your last message).
That then comes with some additional complications. In Magento, if you have 3 colours available in the faceted nav, you'll have all the different variations indexed in each combination.
For example:
Blue
Black
RedBlue + Black
Blue + Red
Black + Red
Black + Blue
Red + Blue
Red + BlackMagento as standard doesn't always keep the filters in the same order, so you can end up with literally thousands of pages ending up in the index for a relatively small number of attributes being shown on your pages.
There are a few recommendations here:
- Go and look at the MageWorx Ultimate SEO Suite Plugin - http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite-ultimate-magento-extension.html - For $249, it solves a lot of issues Magneto has straight out of the box and gives you ultimate control over your meta titles.
What you want to do is set all of your facets to 'NOINDEX,FOLLOW' where possible. This will reduce the number of URLs in the index gradually. An example of this would be adding ?min=* and mode=* etc (grid/list variants).
- For your canonicals, you're probably best setting the canonical to the current filtered page (for example, if you're on a category page with colour = blue selected in your faceted nav, you'd have this URL as your canonical). Some sites we work on have it setup so the canonical points to the category URL (like you currently have).
Finally, you probably want to build an extension to allow you to inject content into the filtered content pages. If you're using an extension like ManaDev for your facet navigation, this can be achieved fairly easily and allows you to add a block of text to each filter applied on a page.
You should also look to request each of the incorrectly indexed URLs is removed from the index (although this does take a long time if you have a lot!).
We wrote a really long guide around launching a Magento website last month which may be of interest - https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/the-definitive-guide-to-launching-a-magento-website/. We've also done a guide on Common Magento SEO Issues here - https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/common-magento-seo-issues/ and I previously wrote a guide on setting Magento up for Search Engines on Moz - https://moz.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines (Although this is likely to be a little outdated now)
I hope this helps!
Lewis
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
-
URL Structure Question
Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search. Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states. Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with... whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa ... or what and why? Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that? I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered. The good news is it's pretty good content. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products. Issues we thought plagued us: Copied Images from competitors Site wide duplicate content duplicate content from competitor site Number of internal links on a page (300+) Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips) being linked to from sites like m.biz URLs URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions Current State of fixing these issues: 50% images are now our own Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed Internal links have been dealt with Rewrote content for every product 90% of meta descriptions are fixed From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Clean URL help!
Hi all, In short, i'm looking to redirect examplepage.html to examplepage .I've got rid of the .html, sitewide this morning. However I want to redirect Google & people who have bookmarked the old url structure. Currently if you have the extension on or not, it will show in your browser. I'm wanting /examplepage.html to 301 redirect to /examplepage I've gone the normal way I'd do it by adding in .htaccess: Redirect 301 /examplepage.html http://www.example.com/examplepage I'm assuming it isn't redirecting as the example.html page is no longer... what is the way around this? Thanks for any help! In firefox the error of the page is: The page isn't redirecting properly Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Switching Url
I started working with a Roofer/Contractor about a year ago. His website is http://www.lancasterparoofing.com/. The name of his business is Spicher Home Improvements. He used to have spicherhomeimprovements.com, well he still does. He was focusing on Roofing and Siding but now would like to branch to other areas like Interior remodeling. So adding interior work under LancasterPaRoofing.com is not applicable. I do not think starting another domain and having two is the best option. I think he should go back to using SpicherHomeImprovements.com and I assume he would take a small hit but in time he should be better off. Plus the url is more applicable to the real name of his business. Thanks for any feedback I receive. Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChadEisenhart0 -
Temporary Redirects on Magento
I've recently taken over a client who uses the Magento platform and there was definitely a duplicate issue with his homepage. It redirected www to non www, however the canonical tag was setup wrong and pointing to the www version. When I looked at OSE for both versions the non www has only 7 linking domains and a page authority of 32. The www version has 24 linking domains and page authority of 39. As the domain is fairly new, I decided to redirect the non www to www and keep the canonical the same. (I changed the internal linking structure etc). When I run both URLs through this tool: http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-... it's returning a whole bunch of 302, rather than 301 redirects. What's the deal with that? Is that a Magento setting that I can fix or something a little harder? I'm not sure if it's proper etiquette to post the URL of a client, so if that would help and is OK, please let me know. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bradkrussell1 -
Does URL format affect Keyword effectiveness for a URL?
I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure. I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like. For example I would like to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford-convertibles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SL_SEM
www.example.com/chevy-convertibles But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford/convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/convertibles But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page: www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive. There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx" Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?0 -
2 Language Versions on Same URL
A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same. If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French). The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99.... would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French. Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors? The site has several thousand pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0