Can I safely block my product listing from search? Does it even make sense?
-
Hi,
I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages.Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories.
My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views: 8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages).Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)?
Thanks,
G -
Have had a lot of success with that kind of deeper logic in the past, you can usually quite easily create such rules using robots.txt wildcards
-
Thanks for your answer and the link, that's actually very useful.
What I mainly struggle with is to understand what I can prune/not and based on what criterias. And the article you've linked is helping a fair bit on that aspect.I'm thinking to start on multiple filter pages with a rule such as "block product listing pages from being indexed if at least 2 filters have been selected". And then see how it impacts the site and my crawl budget.
-
Hello GhillC,
I think we need to agree on terminology first, but it sounds like you can safely limit some of Google's access. Some people call your "product listing pages" either "refinements", "facets", or "filters". When I read "product listing pages" I typically think of what is also called a "category" page, which is a page listing multiple products. A single product page is often referred to as a product detail page (PDP).
Now that we're on the same page (pun intended), let me know if this article answers your question. It is very dated (2011) but gets the point across, which is that you need to be strategic about which facets/refinements/filters you allow to be crawled and/or indexed: https://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck .
One more thing: 5% - 9% of traffic going directly from organic search into a page type would be considered significant for most businesses. When I look at pruning out page types, they're typically responsible for less than 0.5% of traffic from organic search.
-
A product page is a page speaking about a selected product.
Example: a page about the smartphone Samguns Supernova 30A product category is a page speaking about the category, or the type of product it falls into.
Example: smartphone or, if it is too broad, the Supernova lineA product listing is a page listing all the product refined with available criterias such as a product line.
Example: a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones
Or a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones with more than 128GB of HD.
Etc.Does it make more sense?
-
Can you explain the difference between the 'products listings' and the 'actual products themselves'?
You say you still want products and product categories to rank, but not product listings. But to most readers, a product listing is usually a product category or product page (so the info seems to contradict itself, which actually it may not do - just needs more explaining)
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
-
Product photo links appear in search results
Since I'm new, I don't have any information. Product photo links appear in the search results. Is this a problem? because when you click on the link, it does not take you to a page, but to a blank page with only a photo. What should I do for this situation?
Technical SEO | | UgurKarabulut0 -
Where can i install my missing title tag?
in the site crawl area is says "missing title tag" and im not sure how to put it in does it go on my website? if so how because i already have a tracking code in the google analytics area
Technical SEO | | raheemah0 -
Can i use "nofollow" tag on product page (duplicated content)?
Hi, im working on my webstore SEO. I got descriptions from official seller like "Bosch". I got more than 15.000 items so i cant create unique content for each product. Can i use nofollow tag for each product and create great content on category pages? I dont wanna lose rankings because duplicated content. Thank you for help!
Technical SEO | | pejtupizdo0 -
How to change the woocommerce product page permalink
Sorry Posting it again. How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
PhantomJS to Make AJAX Pages Crawlable
Anyone have any experience using PhantomJS to return HTML snapshots of AJAX rendered pages? More specifically, does anyone know if Google takes issue with this technique in any way? Interested in learning about this technique? Using PhantomJS to allow Googlebot to crawl your AJAX pages.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
How can you get accurate search traffic volumes?
I have been trying to get accurate search volumes for the search term "how to dance" in the UK. The results seems to vary wildly. Please could someone tell me how many people actually search for this term each month in the UK on Google (or any other search engine for that matter!)? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
Tool for extracting search queries
Hello, Does anyone know of or have a tool that takes referrer URLs coming from Google which extracts the search query from the URL string? Thank you
Technical SEO | | soeren.hofmayer0 -
CSS for SEO - can search engine see the text in the body?
We use CSS to arranging (absolute positioning) our content to makes it easier to crawl. I am using your On-Page Keyword Optimization tool and other tools to check our pages (i.e. http://www.psprint.com/gallery/invitation-cards), to make sure it works. For the “On-Page Keyword Optimization” tool, it gives a petty good grade (I guest it sees the text in the body). However, when I am using other tool to test the page (e.g. http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/) it could not see the text in the body. Did we do something wrong? Thanks Tom
Technical SEO | | tomchu0