Correct URL Parameters for GWT?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

I am just double checking to see if these parameters are ok - I have added an attachment to this post.

We are using an e-commerce store and dealing with faceted navigation so I excluded a lot of parameters from being crawled as I didnt want them indexed. (they got indexed anyway!).

Advice and recommendations on the use of GWT would be very helpful - please check my screenshot.

thanks,

B0gSmRu

[Davenport-Tractor]

Seems that your putting all sorts of work into an issue, and trying to solve it a way that is the most difficult, and still not getting the results you want, which leads you to do even more work.

Try breaking the issue down into several categories: "Do not index", "Please index", and "Group these together"

Now in you Robots.TXT file use the syntax "DISALLOW:  \high-level-path"  which tells the google bot not to index ALL the pages in you site that have "\high-level-path" an any other additional lower domain structure  in their url. So if you were to use DISALLOW: \mydomaine.com, Google will ignore your entire domain.

second issue instead of trying to include all the "Rules" in GWT it would probably be simpler to include all  the URL you definitely want indexed in your "Sitemap.xml" file.  The free program " Soft Plus Gsite crawler" will automatically build this file for you.

Lastly: The Canonical tag is an easy way to tell Google which pages are similar, like your "Page" parameter

[Everett]

Hello BJS,

The parameters look OK. Keep in mind that adjusting parameter handling in GWT is more of a band-aid than a cure. There are lots of other ways to handle faceted navigation, including rel canonical, robots meta tags, robots.txt and others. Read this article if you haven't already:

http://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck

And here's a Whiteboard Friday on the topic: "http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

Keep a close eye on rankings once you've implemented those parameter handling rules. Be sure to annotate your analytics account with the date on which this was done for possible future diagnostics. See: http://www.google.com/analytics/features/annotations.html