Hello,
after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site.
Current indexation status:
- The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages
- Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages
- Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages
Additional info:
- Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination.
- Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting:
example.com/category --> example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100
- Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed.
- When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position).
- In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages.
- The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000
And so I have a few questions:
- Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed?
- If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt?
- Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way?
- As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure?
Thanks in advance,
Andrew
