E-commerce Site - Filter Pages

[jasarrow]

Hi,

We have a client who has a fairly large e-commerce site that went live quite recently. The site is near enough fully indexed by Google, but one thing I've noticed is that filtered search results pages are being indexed, all with duplicate page titles. Obviously this is an issue that needs to be looked at ASAP.

My questions is this - would we be better tweaking site settings so that page titles are constructed from the filters (brand/price/size) and therefore unique (and useful for searchers who are after a specific brand or size of a given item). Or should we rel=canonical the filtered pages so that they are eventually dropped from the index (the safer of the two options)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[matbennett]

This is sounding familiar. I've spent the last few months tackling an issue very like this on some sites.

First thing I would say is forget constructing the titles. that worked really well until the panda update, but is a real problem now. If you end up with a large number of similar pags unique titles are not going to save you.    We had a site that, pre-panda, was doing brilliantly in the long tail thanks to exactly what you describe.  When panda hit it sunk like a stone.

My suggestion would be to get the canonical in place ASAP and start monitoring how quickly (or not) the number of indexed pages drops. We're finding that getting the pages removed is taking forever. We've gone from 400,000 pages (yes... it was THAT bad) to 53,000. However that had taken nearly 6 months so far.

I hope that is helpful. Let me know if you have other questions.

[jasarrow]

Thanks for your useful input Mat. I thought it may be the case that canonical tags was the way to go but It's good to hear the thoughts of somebody whos 'been there, done that'. It would be nice to capitalise on the traffic that filter pages could bring but it just isn't worth the risk. Canonical tags now implemented!

Thanks again!

[matbennett]

More "been there - still doing that", but you are welcome