Should i noindex/nofollow a faceted navigation page?
-
I have an ecommerce website with 4 departments, that share the same categories,
For example a bicycle shop would have different products for mountain biking and road cycling, but they would both share the same 'tyres' category.
I get around this by having the department as a filter, that changes the products on show, and adds a URL parameter of ?department=1.
When this filter is applied, i have a canonical link setup to the non-filtered category. Any filter links are nofollowed.
My top menu has 4 different sections, one for each department, and links to these URLs with the department parameter already on, these links are set to allow robots to follow.
As i am actively pointing Google at these pages, and it is my main navigation, should the page they go to be noindexed? As its the canonical i want to rank.
Hopefully this makes sense.
Cheers
-
Hello SEOhmygod,
If you could share your site I would be able to provide better input. From the sound of it though, if I understand correctly, you are canonicalizing each department back to a version of the page for all departments. That is probably not ideal. It would be better to have each department have its own landing page for each category, on which you would customize Title, description and OnPage content for that particular department. You may also want to consider rewriting the URL instead of using a filter so:
.com/tyres?department=1
becomes
.com/tyres/mountain-biking/
or
.com/mountain-biking/tyres
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
-
Should I noindex pages on my website that are pulled from an API integration
SEO/Moz newbie here! My organisation's website (dyob.com.au), uses an API integration to pull through listings that are shown in the site search. There is a high volume of these, all of which only contain a title, image and contact information for the business. I can see these pages coming up on my Moz accounts with issues such as duplicate content (even if they are different) or no description. We don't have the capacity to fill these pages with content. Here's an example: https://www.dyob.com.au/products/nice-buns-by-yomg I am looking for a recommendation on how to treat these pages. Are they likely to be hurting the sites SEO? We do rank for some of these pages. Should they be noindex pages? TIA!
Technical SEO | | monica.arklay0 -
Page for page 301 redirects from old server to new server
Hi guys:
Technical SEO | | cindyt-17038
I have a client who is moving their entire ecommerce site from one hosting platform (Yahoo Store) to another (BigCommerce) and from one domain to another. The old domain is registered with the Yahoo as of yesterday and we have redirected the old domain (at the domain level) to the new domain. However, we are having trouble getting the pages to redirect page for page. Currently they are all redirecting to the new domain home page. We did just move the old domain from GoDaddy to Yahoo yesterday thinking this would solve it however as of this morning the old pages are still redirecting to the home page of the new domain. To complete the 301 redirect picture, we uploaded the redirects (all relative links for both from and to) to BigCommerce. And while the domain was hosted at GoDaddy with a redirect to the new domain, they were working. We moved the domain to Yahoo because of email issues thinking it should still work. Is it possibly just a waiting game now as the change populates across the DNS? old url to test:
rock-n-roll-action-figures.com/fender-jazz-bass-miniature-guitar-replica-classic-red-finish.html0 -
How come only 2 pages of my 16 page infographic are being crawled by Moz?
Our Infographic titled "What Is Coaching" was officially launched 5 weeks ago. http://whatiscoaching.erickson.edu/ We set up campaigns in Moz & Google Analytics to track its performance. Moz is reporting No organic traffic and is only crawling 2 of the 16 pages we created. (see first and third attachments) Google Analytics is seeing hundreds of some very strange random pages (see second attachment) Both campaigns are tracking the url above. We have no idea where we've gone wrong. Please help!! 16_pages_seen_in_wordpress.png how_google_analytics_sees_pages.png what_moz_sees.png
Technical SEO | | EricksonCoaching0 -
When we have 301 page is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex?
Hi, When we have a page as 301 (Permanent Redirect) is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex? Example http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 when clicked goes to http://www.Somename.com/blogs/whenittyam Should i noindex the below pages http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 and add Rel=Canonical Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Should I Use the Disavow Tool to for a Spammy Site/Landing Page?
Here's the situation... There's a site that is linking to about 6 articles of mine from about 225 pages of theirs (according to info in GWT). These pages are sales landing pages looking to sell their product. The pages are pretty much identical but have different urls. (I actually have a few sites doing this to me.) Here's where I think it's real bad -- when they are linking to me you don't see the link on the page, you have to view the page source and search for my site's url. I'm thinking having a hidden url, and it being my article that's hidden, has got to be bad. That on top of it being a sales page for a product I've seen traffic to my site dropping but I don't have a warning in GWT. These aren't links that I've placed or asked for in any way. I don't see how they could be good for me and I've already done what I could to email the site to remove the links (I didn't think it would work but thought I'd at least try). I totally understand that the site linking to me may not have any affect on my current traffic. So should I use the Disavow tool to make sure this site isn't counting against me?
Technical SEO | | GlenCraig0 -
Do Collections in Shopify create Duplicate Pages according to Google/Bing/Yahoo?
I'm using the e-commerce platform Shopify to host an e-store. We've put our products into different collections. Shopify automatically creates different URL paths to a product in multiple collections. I'm worried that the same product listed in different collections is soon as different pages, and therefore duplicate content by Google/Bing/Yahoo. Would love to get your opinion on this concern! Thanks! Matthew
Technical SEO | | HappinessDigital0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
If you only want your home page to rank, can you use rel="canonical" on all your other pages?
If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page? As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.
Technical SEO | | watchcases0