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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:

1. Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed?
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. 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

Thank you so much!

You've understood the situation correctly and this is the most helpful answer I'd wish for

Thanks again.

Adding "noindex" meta tag or disallowing the page from within robots.txt will do the trick.

Hello there!

I use a plugin on my ecom site that shows customer reviews - not product reviews but general shopping experience reviews. The plugin also loads links and short descriptions of products those customers bought.

Having installed it site-wide, on every page there are short descriptions of the same products. Of course, as people leave new reviews the content changes (but it doesn't happen very often).

So the question is:

Is having links and short descriptions of the same products on every page harmful for SEO in this case?

I'd be grateful for any insight into this matter.

Adding "noindex" meta tag or disallowing the page from within robots.txt will do the trick.