URL Parameters as a single solution vs Canonical tags
-
Hi all,
We are running a classifieds platform in Spain (mercadonline.es) that has a lot of duplicate content. The majority of our duplicate content consists of URL's that contain site parameters. In other words, they are the result of multiple pages within the same subcategory, that are sorted by different field names like price and type of ad. I believe if I assign the correct group of url's to each parameter in Google webmastertools then a lot these duplicate issues will be resolved.
Still a few questions remain:
- Once I set f.ex. the 'page' parameter and i choose 'paginates' as a behaviour, will I let Googlebot decide whether to index these pages or do i set them to 'no'? Since I told Google Webmaster what type of URL's contain this parameter, it will know that these are relevant pages, yet not always completely different in content. Other url's that contain 'sortby' don't differ in content at all so i set these to 'sorting' as behaviour and set them to 'no' for google crawling.
- What parameter can I use to assign this to 'search' I.e. the parameter that causes the URL's to contain an internal search string. Since this search parameter changes all the time depending on the user input, how can I choose the best one. I think I need 'specifies'?
- Do I still need to assign canonical tags for all of these url's after this process or is setting parameters in my case an alternative solution to this problem?
I can send examples of the duplicates. But most of them contain 'page', 'descending' 'sort by' etc values.
Thank you for your help.
Ivor
-
Great! All clear to me now.
I'll let you know how things will have developed soon.
Thanks for your input!
Best,
Ivor
-
Hi Ivor,
I wouldn't pay much attention to those Google guidelines about duplicate content.
Yes, Canonical tags are best practice, but what you're dealing with is dynamically generated query URLs from your CMS. If you opted to follow Google's guidelines on this you'd have to either manually set Canonical tags for each query as it is created, or set up a rule to do this automatically.
Both sound tricky to me so I'd just stick with the robots.txt alterations you've made and you should be fine.
Make sure you set back everything to index, follow. This is because you're giving the search engine instructions to ignore specific URLs in the robots.txt and you're also doing this in the meta robots function.
When this occurs the search engine gets confused and then makes it's own best judgement as per the article you've referenced.
Best to keep it simple and leave everything index, follow and keep the robots.txt in place to block these URLs and see how your results go.
Also might be a good idea to touch up your content on the page. I'd suggest about 250 words of content with your targeted keyword twice and 2-3 LSI keywords once each. You can put this at the bottom of the page, after the products so it doesnt push your products down. For more info on content you can check out my blog post here: http://searchfactory.com.au/blog/optimise-content-marketing-writing-for-google-hummingbird-semantic-search/
All the best!
Stel (@StelinSEO )
-
Hi Stel,
It all seems to work fine. After i waited until this morning for the weekly MOZ crawl, I notice the technical issues dropped almost completely. But I keep being confused whether i should allow for these pages still to be set to either "index, follow" or rather to "no-index, no follow"?
Right now, we have set dissallow commands in robots.txt, canonical tags and no index, no follow tags.
If you read Google's guidelines, they don't recommend blocking duplicate content in robots.txt but seem to prefer using canonical tags only https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359
Google does not recommend blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the
rel="canonical"
link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.And with duplicate content not set to no-index, no-follow they claim they would choose for the right pages to be displayed:
Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
So if I read this, I should perhaps set my tags to index, follow? And still keep the robots.txt commands and canonical rel tags?
Thanks a lot for your input.
Ivor
-
Hi Ivor,
The problem with _Disallow: /*? _is it only blocks top level queries like this: **mercadonline.es/?page=13&sort=price_true **, but it won't block this: mercadonline.es/anuncios-ciudad-real/?page=13&sort=price_true
So by adding a wildcard directory (i.e. Disallow: //?) this will block queries that occur at any level of your URL structure, like the one second bold example above.
You can indeed just block all queries if you like, but I'm not 100% what your structure is like. If you're sure it won't adversely affect any other pages, then Disallow: //? will solve the sort, price and page issues you've highlighted.
Once you're happy with the robots.txt (just had a look and looks fine to me) run it through screamingfrog and siteliner.com and see if these domains have been blocked and what Duplicate content issues exist.
-
Thank your Donford!
- Ivor
-
Hi Stel,
Thanks for your answer.
- Since we have already added: Disallow: /*? to the robots.txt, will this already exclude all parameters? Or is it better to refine this as you describe as follows:
Disallow: /*/*sort
Disallow: /*/*descending
Disallow: /*/*orderby
- Moreover, would I have to add as well:
Disallow: /*/*page
Disallow: /*page
- Finally, is we have search strings in our parameters; could we add this as well to our robots.txt? Since this content changes all the time.
If you like, I can send you my robots.txt file in a PM.
Thanks a lot for your help!
Ivor
-
Hi Ivor,
I concur with donford's answer, definitely something that can be sorted out by the robots text file. However, I would suggest using the following parameters for robots.txt:
**User-agent: ***
*Disallow: /*/page
*Disallow: /*/sort
*Disallow: /*/descendingMy reason for suggesting the extra /* is this will target URLs that appear on the second or below level.
I may be wrong, but it's best to try both by using the robots.txt checker in Webmaster Tools.
This article will give you an overview of how the robots.txt checker works: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062598?hl=en
All you have to do is click the link on the post that says robots.txt checker, login to Webmaster Tools and paste everything you see in bold in the text box. Then paste the following (also in bold) into the field below that says Enter a URL to test if it is blocked anuncios-ciudad-real/?page=13&sort=price_true
Click the test button and if it says BLOCKED you can add this to your robots.txt file, stored at top level in your FTP server.
Feel free to Tweet me at @StelinSEO if you have any further issues!
All the best,
Stel
-
Hi Ivor,
This is a very good place for canonical tags. If you put the canonical tag on the root page then you should be okay when the page=2 or sort=Az parameters are added it will still canonical to root page. There is nothing wrong with putting a canonical page tag to itself so there is little worry about.
Fixing parameters in Google is only one of the search engines all the other crawlers won't know what Google sees so it is best to fix it for everybody.
The other option would be to use a exclude in your robots.txt so the pages are not seen as duplicates, but I would advise to use canonical first.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*page
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*sort
For example.
Hope this helps
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
-
URL Parameters
Hi Moz Community, I'm working on a website that has URL parameters. After crawling the site, I've implemented canonical tags to all these URLs to prevent them from getting indexed by Google. However, today I've found out that Google has indexed plenty of URL parameters.. 1-Some of these URLs has canonical tags yet they are still indexed and live. 2- Some can't be discovered through site crawling and they are result in 5xx server error. Is there anything else that I can do (other than adding canonical tags) + how can I discover URL parameters indexed but not visible through site crawling? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bbop330 -
Canonical Tag Question Regarding Two State Pages
Hi Moz Fam! Question... we have two pages for each state. Both pages are used in our PPC campaigns. One of the two state pages is fully optimized for organic search. The page that's optimized for organic has 1,500-2,000 words, the other one has thin content. All the content is unique, nothing duplicate. We call one set of state pages that I optimized my SEO state pages, then the other ones are our PPC state pages. Should I be setting a canonical tag to one of these pages to let Google know which one is the "master" page? (My SEO state page is the master) I've never used them, so I'm not sure what the right answer is for this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Canonical vs 301 - Web Development
So I'm having a conversation with the development team at my work and I'm a little tired today so I thought I would ask for other opinions. The currently the site duplicates it's full site by having a 200 show with or without a trailing slash. I have asked for a 301 redirect to with the trailing slash. They countered with having all the rel=canonical be the trailing slash, which I know is acceptable. My issue is that while a rel=canonical is acceptable, since my site has a very high level of competition and a very aggressive link building strategy, I believe that it may be beneficial to have the 301 redirect. BUT, I may be wrong. When we're talking hundreds of thousands of links, I would love to have them directly linked instead of possibly splitting them up between a duplicate page that has a correct canonical. I'm curious to what everyone thinks though....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn1 -
Fast/Easy Way to Implement Canonical tags in Bulk in Magento CMS?
Hello Amazing SEO Community! Quick Q for a client with a TON of duplicate content. (yikes!) My client is currently undertaking a large SEO project around canonical tagging for their thousands of duplicate pages. Currently, one product sits on multiple URLs and they are being indexed as different pages (with the same content). The issue is found across all products and other pages, and across their international sites as well. One core challenge they face now is lack of time/resources from their developer side. The solution we see to the duplicate content is to manually add a canonical tag to each of our tens of thousands of pages. Their content management system is Magento. Has anyone ever tackled canonicalization for a large site that uses Magento? Any more efficient solutions to manual tagging is ideal. Thanks in advance for your input. -Bonnie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Does Bing support cross-domain canonical tag?
Hi folks, We are planning to implement a cross-domain canonical tag for a client and I'm looking for some information on bing supporting cross-domain canonical tag. Does anyone knows if there was a public announcement made by Bing or any representative about the support of this tag? Btw, the best info I've found is a Q&A here on Moz about it http://moz.com/community/q/does-bing-support-cross-domain-canonical-tags but I'm looking for a Bing information on the topic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
How to fix duplicated urls
I have an issue with duplicated pages. Should I use cannonical tag and if so, how? Or should change the page titles? This is causing my pages to compete with each other in the SERPs. 'Paradisus All Inclusive Luxury Resorts - Book your stay at Paradisus Resorts' is also used on http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5889 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5891 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5910 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5911 line 9 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0