Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0