I have an e-commerce site. For the T-shirts page I want the only URL indexed by search engines to be
mysite/items/t-shirts/
But there are filters on the page so a user can filter by size, colour, material etc.
I thought about keeping the URL to always display as
mysite/items/t-shirts/
regardless of which filters are chosen so that search engines don't index pages like:
mysite/items/t-shirts/?colour=red
mysite/items/t-shirts/?colour=red&size=xl
mysite/items/t-shirts/?colour=red&size=xl&material=cotton
but this breaks the back button.
So I'm thinking of keeping the URL parameters so the back button can be used and to prevent search engines from indexing urls with parameters I'll put the following in the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
# Block crawlers from storing pages with parameters
Disallow: /*/*?
Is this the best approach or are there better alternatives?
Related
We have pages which have been split into multiple pages as they are too in depth. The structure currently...
Page (www.domain.com/page)
We have split this up like so...
Page + Subtitle (www.new-domain.com/page-subtitle-1)
Page + Subtitle (www.new-domain.com/page-subtitle-2)
Page + Subtitle (www.new-domain.com/page-subtitle-3)
I need to know the correct way of adding in multiple canonical tags on the original page. Is it search engine friendly to add say 3/4 canonical tags linking to 3/4 separate pages?
Well, this is what you should do -
Keep the complete page even if you are dividing into component pages.
Use rel="next" and rel="prev" links to indicate the relationship between component URLs. This markup provides a strong hint to Google that you would like it to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page.
In each of the component pages, add a rel="canonical" link to the original (all content) page. This will tell google about the all content page.
This strategy is recommended by google - read here.
Canonical tags are basically to consolidate link signals for duplicate or similar content. With that said, you are not supposed to have multiple canonical tags in a page. You have two options.
If your old page is going to go away, then you should pick one primary page(in the split pages) and do a 301 redirect, so the SEO value are carried over to that new primary URL.
If its going to stay, you can create internal links to the new pages. But make sure the content is different, so that it does not count as duplicate pages.
Hope this helps.
Hello Good morning all,
Hope all doing well, i am in a triangular situation for my multiple details pages, i want some idea how i can avoid google to not to crawl my details page and to crowl its container page which contains 90% same keyword, meta and url. For an example i have one page which is a master page of multiple categories here http://www.estatemarker.com/ahmedabad/industrial-properties.html it contains multiple categories when i open a category it let us to another page http://www.estatemarker.com/ahmedabad/industrial-warehouse.html which is subcategory now this subcategory has area vise listings of multiple pages this pages are same as this subcategory page but these contains listing of area only and this page has actual listing posted by brokers, now problem is i want to focus google on this page area vise page only but this page contains 50 more listing which opens a details page and details page contains 90% of same keyword and other SEO stuffs per the area vise page page. I need a guidance how i should avoid google to not to crawl this details page and area vise page instead.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance
you can give canonical tag or can use
Robot.txt codes like
User-agent: *
Disallow: *?dir=*
Disallow: *&order=*
Disallow: *?price=*
to face such problems.
http://www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/
If I have a site called http://example.com, and under it I have articles, such as:
http://example.com/articles/norwegian-statoil-ceo-resigns
Basically, I don't want the text from the frontpage to show on Google results, so that when you search for "statoil ceo", you ONLY get the article itself, but not the frontpage which contains this text but is not of the article itself.
If you did that, then Google could still display your home page with a note under the link saying they couldnt crawl the page. This is because robots.txt doesnt stop a page being indexed. You could noindex the home page, though personally I wouldnt recommend it.
I use sites that check out my website for SEO And I get the following message:
"his page title is not unique. Assign unique, descriptive TITLE tags and headings to every page."
accessbar.co.il
accessbar.co.il/index.aspx
But it should be the same page.
Your home page can be pulled up using two different URLs:
accessbar.co.il/
accessbar.co.il/index.aspx
They may be the same page to you, but to search engines they are two separate URLs and thus considered two separate pages. You should do one or more of the following:
do a 301 redirect from accessbar.co.il/index.aspx to accessbar.co.il/
put a canonical URL on accessbar.co.il/index.aspx pointing to accessbar.co.il/
My site design has three rails: navigation on the left, user generated discussions in the center (liquid), and a primary editorial block in the right rail (no advertising). So, an article would be published by me and appear at the top of the right rail, and user comments would appear in the center rail.
I want search engines to see the right rail content as the primary content, and so the meta description for each page would be related to the right rail.
Is it possible to do this in an SEO friendly way?
[Note: an SEO consulting firm have implied to my boss that web crawlers only "care about the center rail", and if the meta information disagrees with center rail content they will ignore the page]
Search engines cannot see the page the way human users do. Search engines see just the html code of the page, so they cannot distinguish between left, center or right rails. They do, however, have a sense of were the header, the body and the footer of a page is.
When it comes to the body of a page, search engines tend to give more relevance to text which closer to the the top. So if you can have a block of text at the top of your html source, move it visually with CSS somewhere lower on the page, and still (probably) remain more relevant than other blocks of text.
However, there is no way to specify to search engines what your "primary content" of a page is. Search engines determine the relevancy of a page in relation to keywords based on a lot of different on-page signals, so you should focus on those.
As for the meta description, your boss should choose the SEO consulting firms more carefully, as what they recommended is actually a nonsense. Meta descriptions are only used (eventually) by Google (for example) to generate the snippet for your pages in search results. They have no value when in comes to rankings.
Here's two SEO facts regarding meta descriptions that come directly from Google: Seo Fact NO.3, Seo Fact NO.4
Positioning of visible content on a page is handled using CSS.
There's a number of different approaches available from using float to position:absolute etc. For SEO purposes, there's no single-best approach, as long as you have your article content appear closest to the <body> tag, before the other "rails" or "columns".