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    What to do with extremely high number of URLs on your site?

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    • TLO
      TLO last edited by

      Here is the situation:

      The site has tons of business and personal profiles, the information needed to be categorized as such directories were created in an attempt to keep the URL structure clean - so for example:

      www.abc.com/product/um/name-here/city-name/state/lastname:3458765

      Each profile has a unique ID#, and for some reason there needed to be a category for a user in this case /um/ stands for user name.

      Webmaster tool steps to resolve state to use an rel=canonical which can be done for that directory /um/ but I am concerned about the bot not being able to find the other pages beyond that directory, like the profile name, city, state associated. So I guess my ultimate question is if I use rel=canonical will the rest of the content not get crawled or indexed as well?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • anthonydnelson
        anthonydnelson last edited by

        Does everything need to be indexed? If not, perhaps the personal profiles could be noindexed. Let the search engines crawl all of your content, but only have them index pages that provide value to the SERPs.\

        Only use rel=canonical if the content on different URLs is the exact same. Using it incorrectly will cause content to not be indexed.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • irvingw
          irvingw last edited by

          This is not what the canonical tag is intended for.

          The personal profiles will most likely be very low content dupes of each other like these which are indexed and should not be:

          https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=site:www.imeet.com&oq=site:www.imeet.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=hp.3...446.446.0.458.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0.uZHApsCZ_-g&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=eeee66798b61e3b7&biw=1920&bih=902

          if pages deeper in that folder are good content worthy of being indexed then:

          a) add noindex,follow to these profile pages

          b) add index, follow to the deeper pages

          that will keep the bots crawling the profile pages to the deeper folders with content you want indexed.

          You can also disallow the /un/ (user name) folder and allow the deeper folders with robots.txt commands. We were just discussing this:

          http://www.seomoz.org/q/allow-or-disallow-first-in-robots-txt

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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