Is this is Wow HIT ME IN THE Face Google bug or am I missing something?
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We have a page on our site https://www.spurshelving.co.uk/shop/bigimage.aspx?m=353&i=3436 which enders happily on all browsers as far as I am aware and is reasonably well optimised.
So when google sent me a link to a new test tool I just had to check it out.
Well the result was shocking...... The page that renders in the results is a default missing product page and not the page that the link renders on a web page. I played a little and simply used the I=3436 attribute and the page appeared no problem I then reversed the attributes so that they were i=3436&m=353 and the page again resolved totally as expected. This indicates to me that Google have an issue with aspx attributes. Now I know what to do but is this same issue an issue in spidering and indexing pages. If is is wow that is a big smack in the face. Does it also harm search results in other engines.
Keen for comments here
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Sorry for the long delay I have been away on vacation.
Your response is very valid and indeed in our generated string we do also include product titles, however since changing the order of the aspx attributes our sales have taken off. An issue we have is that we have many products which have very slight variations in name and come up against the the URL too long issue to give real keyword rich titles. We choose to use the attributes to make sure that pages are visited by google on feeds to them, but then generate the title on the fly when the page is rendered. This keeps the url nice and short for Google to locate but allows the spider to see the title in the url. The issue remains that Google are not spidering the all of the attributes but using just the first they come across even if it gives rise to duplicate feeds. You would think that they would index using a sample with all attributes and then with individual attributes to make sure they gain the most content rich and valid results.
We will now run a test to see if truncating the titles improves indexing or shows little or no improvement. I would like to think that this is fairly minor as long as the keywords are close to the start of the title string and hence if Google truncates for result display purposes users will still gain a rich experience.
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Well maybe this is a good time to stop using query strings! Sometimes Google has a hard time understanding which parameters matter and which are for things like sorting. I'd recommend using mod_rewrite or similar to a) get rid of the query string and b) get the product name or keywords into the URL
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