Ignore url parameters without the 'parameter=' ?

[Hakkasan]

We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign?

For example:

www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m

www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black

Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ?

Thanks!

[john4math]

As far as I know, you can't do this in Google Webmaster tools.  It would have to be a parameter like shopby= instead of shopby/ as you suspect.

This sounds like a good place to use the rel=canonical tag.  You want those pages to exist, and if people link to them, you want them to pass their link juice back to the /tshirts/ page.  These shopby pages will have a subset of the info on the /tshirts/ page, so Google should respect the canonical tag.

Other search engines beyond Google should respect the canonical tag as well, so that's another benefit to doing it outside of Google Webmaster Tools.

Here's some reading:

rel=canonical: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Using canonical to a view all page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

[Hakkasan]

Thanks for the response!

Yes, we do want to implement the rel=canonical tag but since we are using Magento to build on we are having some issues. One of the issues is that we have the shirts page with sort features:

www.mysite.com/shirts/shoby/size-m

and then the tshirts page:

www.mystie.com/shirts/tshirts/shoby/size-m

So the problem we're running into is trying to figure out how to write a script to implement rel=canonical so that for the first URL, everything after shirts canonicalizes to the /shirts/ URL, and then for the second URL everything after tshirts canonicalizes back to the /shirts/tshirts/ URL without the /shirts/ rel=canonical overriding it.