Welcome to the Q&A Forum

From what I can gather about Magento is the Layered Nav can create seemingly endless URL's.  Even if you were to use one of the modules created to make them 'friendly', you would still technically have reems of duplicate pages...right?  All nicely re-written but effectively with the same titles and meta...

You may be able to put a wildcard disallow in the robots file for the parameter 'dir=' , which is associated with all the filters.  I dont know how well this will work or if Google may on occasision ignore this or find a way into the layered pages anyway?  Does anyone know?  What if the spider entered the site through a direct link to filtered page...would the robots.txt file go by the way side in this instance?

You could in theory also use WMT to dictate that Google does not index pages with the 'dir=' parameter.  Again, I am not sure as to the success rate using this.

Its one of those areas that has many open and unaswered discussions but nothing definitive anywhere to address the issue.  Yet Magento is very popular and as you look at people sites who use it you can see they have some how found a way to sort this out.  Id love to be a fly on the wall in their office!

It looks as though the site lost most of its LongTail traffic...   Feb 1st-15th showing 131 different keyterms and Feb 16th-28th showing just 35. At the same time the traffic from branded search terms reduced significantly across the many variations.

For the mentioned time periods, Direct Traffic was virtually double in the second period.

With the drop in search/longtail and the perfectly coinciding jump in direct traffic, as a whole the site traffic remained roughly on trend.  Very strange!  It has remained this way ever since.

Thanks for the advice - Keyword analysis suggests some work could be done to re-introduce what has been lost there.  As for that coinciding Direct traffic jump... I need to dig into that some more to fathom it.  Wish me luck.

I have read about the Google algorithm updates galore in 2012.  I would therefore be inclined to suspect a sudden sharp drop in Search traffic this year to be caused by such updates.  However, I am seeing what appears to be a direct switch from 'Search' to 'Direct' traffic as of about February 16th this year.

There are no specific brand-building exercises or general advertising campaigns happening around this time for the site in question.  It seems very UN-explainable?

I wondered if there are any thoughts from the various lurking gurus?  I have attached GA screenshot..

DjTu1.png

The problem I am currently facing is a site where the individual 'Simple Products' were not set to be invisible.  They have all been indexed!

So I have the same question really.