Am I losing link juice with 302-redirected faceted navigation?
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My site has faceted navigation that allows shoppers to filter category page results by things brand, size, price range, etc. These pages 302 redirect to the same page they came from, which already include canonical meta tags. I added the rel="nofollow" attribute to the facet links and added the line "Disallow: /category_filter/" to robots.txt.
One of our SEO consultants told me that this is likely diluting the potency of the page's link juice since they are divided among all the page's links, including the links I am instructing crawlers to disregard.
Can anybody tell me whether I am following the best practices for links that redirect to the same page?
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I considered this but our shopping cart software is has a lot of "black box" features including this one, so I have no control over how this feature is handled. Also, we use SLI search with site champion, which does a very similar auto-generated landing page function for category facets so including this function again would be redundant and possibly dilute our indexed results.
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Why are you 302 redirecting in the first place? Doesn't make much sense to me.
Why aren't your filter links simple hyperlinks?
The correct way to do this would be:
- Set urlrewrite's that match your filter expressions (e.g. /category1/brand, or /category3/xxl)
- In your category results page have hyperlinks that point at the rewritten urls (you build these dynamically)
This will avoid 302's completely and stop any redirects.
An alternative to this would be to server side filtering of data on page postback and avoid redirects this way.
I'm not sure how correct your SEO consultant is about the link juice being divided amongst all links inlcuding those that are nofollowed. My understanding is that if it is nofollowed, the search engine essentially ignores it.
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It sounds to me that you are in the clear. The use of the canonical tag would prevent pagerank dispersion, the use of the nofollow tag would as well, and the robots.txt file should prevent the spidering of those pages. Is google indexing any of the category filter pages?
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