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I just thought of something else, if I do a robots.txt disallow to this parameter, wouldn't it kill all the rankings from external links to pages that contain this parameter?

It's been at least 6 weeks since I set it up, probably more like 2 months.

Thanks for the robots.txt idea, I'll give it a shot. However I would still like to figure out what is going on with Google parameter definition.

Hey forum,

About my site, idealchooser.com. Few weeks ago I've defined a parameter "sort" at the Google Webmaster tool that says effect: "Sorts" and Crawl: "No URLs". The logic is simple, I don't want Google to crawl and index the same pages with a different sort parameter, only the default page without this parameter.

The weird thing is that under "HTML Improvement" Google keeps finding "Duplicate Title Tag" for the exact same pages with a different sort parameter. For example:

/shop/Kids-Pants/16//shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=Price/shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=PriceHi

These aren't old pages and were flagged by Google as duplicates weeks after the sort parameter was defined.

Any idea how to solve it? It seems like Google ignores my parameters handling requests.

Thank you.

For people who find this and want the final results, these are what I see at my site, YMMV:

1. Links from image maps are indeed followed, Google crawls pages that are only accessible via the image map. nofollow also seems to be respected, unless Google just decided not to index these pages for another reason, but I doubt it.

2. The images are indeed indexed for Google images as one image containing the entire map. This image gets the "alt" value of the entire image, not the individual map segments.

I hope this is useful.

I don't think it matters where the 302 is coming from, 302 means a ranking drop. The fact that you saw no effect probably means there were other changes to offset it, or that it just take Google longer to respond to it.

Regardless, I wouldn't leave a site with 302 on a ranking pages, it's just asking for trouble.

I hope this helps.

Thank you! Great info and suggestions. I'll take your advice and post here once I get the results, so others can benefit from it.

Hey forum,

I'm curious about Image Maps. Few things I'm not sure about:

1. Will the links be followed? If so, will Google respect rel="nofollow"?

2. Will the image be considered 1 image? (indexed as image, etc.) Or will each map segment be treated as a separate image?

3. Any other SEO pros\cons to consider when adding an image map to an existing page?

Thanks,

Corwin.

Without getting too technical, currently the user isn't really being redirected at all, because it's a dynamic page with the results, which can be any number, in this case, 0.

I will take your advice and indeed create a custom "out of stock" page that will be returned for all these cases. Maybe it will be clearer to Google. Obviously these won't rank well, but I'm fine with it, as long as I don't get ranking penalty for the entire site, for none existing pages. Under the circumstances I guess this is the best option.

Thank you very Daniel, you've been very helpful.

Thanks again Daniel.

I'm a web developer too

What would a "proper page" be though? Keep in mind at this point I don't know anything about this product. Each general "out of stock" page will be the same for each product making it a "soft 404" probably, unless I make it a real 404, which will solve the "soft 404" but will create a new problem, 404 pages for some previously valid URLs.

Both are not good, I'm aware of it, however, we are talking less than 0.05% of the site's pages.

Thanks for the reply Daniel. Here's an example link: link

Basically anything with a wrong number will return this page. I know it's not a great page for this purpose, just a regular product page with 0 items and a message. It's just rare enough that we didn't spend too much on it. How rare? According to the Webmaster tool, out of the last 296k pages crawled, 70 were found.

Basically at this point, I have no information on this item, all I know is that someone got here so it's probably a valid product code, which is true unless someone just edited the URL manually.

For people who find this and want the final results, these are what I see at my site, YMMV:

1. Links from image maps are indeed followed, Google crawls pages that are only accessible via the image map. nofollow also seems to be respected, unless Google just decided not to index these pages for another reason, but I doubt it.

2. The images are indeed indexed for Google images as one image containing the entire map. This image gets the "alt" value of the entire image, not the individual map segments.

I hope this is useful.