URL Parameters in XML sitemap?

[CCAECOM]

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[LesleyPaone]

Dan,

I think you are kind of answering your own question. I do not really see a need to put them in the robots text if you are telling search engines that the canonical is a different url. They will crawl and find the other pages, but at the same time you are redirecting them back to the root category.

Pagination is a tough thing to deal with in ecommerce. I have tried different methods with varying success, but generally i just leave it up to the search engine to determine whether they want to index and rank the page.

[webmethod]

Hi Dan,

There are 2 ways to handle pagination in Google's eyes:

1. Use a "view-all" page, whereby all paginated pages (?pg=x) have a canonical to the page that has all the results on it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

2. Use rel=next and rel=previous between the paginated pages. There is no one single page that has all the results on it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Each has its own merits and the choice usually depends on page performance (for the first option) vs. time to implement (for the 2nd option).

If you have lots of categories and products and offer list sorting in the URL and faceted navigation you run the risk of submitting a ton of URLs to Google, so the clean up you're doing sounds like a good approach.

Finally, in WMT I presume you have the pg parameter configured as "paginates" for the "effect".

Hope that helps

George