Help with facet URLs in Magento

HappyJackJr

Hi Guys,

Wondering if I can get some technical help here...

We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout.

These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process.

Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example,

_http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19_

Canonical to...

_http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html_

Which I understand to be incorrect.

As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution?

As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series.

Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black )

But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior?

My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls.

Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter.

Thanks

PinpointDesigns

Hi!

We do a lot of consultancy for Magento projects and this is a question that comes up quite regularly as it can't really be handled perfectly straight out of the box with Magento.

Every implementation is a little bit different, but I'll put together some recommendations below based on the information available at the moment.

For your faceted navigation, you ideally don't want to index any of these pages, unless you believe that you'll rank in your own right for specific filters (e.g. Colour, like you pointed out in your last message).

That then comes with some additional complications. In Magento, if you have 3 colours available in the faceted nav, you'll have all the different variations indexed in each combination.

For example:

Blue
Black
Red

Blue + Black
Blue + Red
Black + Red
Black + Blue
Red + Blue
Red + Black

Magento as standard doesn't always keep the filters in the same order, so you can end up with literally thousands of pages ending up in the index for a relatively small number of attributes being shown on your pages.

There are a few recommendations here:

Go and look at the MageWorx Ultimate SEO Suite Plugin - http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite-ultimate-magento-extension.html - For $249, it solves a lot of issues Magneto has straight out of the box and gives you ultimate control over your meta titles.

What you want to do is set all of your facets to 'NOINDEX,FOLLOW' where possible. This will reduce the number of URLs in the index gradually. An example of this would be adding ?min=* and mode=* etc (grid/list variants).

For your canonicals, you're probably best setting the canonical to the current filtered page (for example, if you're on a category page with colour = blue selected in your faceted nav, you'd have this URL as your canonical). Some sites we work on have it setup so the canonical points to the category URL (like you currently have).

Finally, you probably want to build an extension to allow you to inject content into the filtered content pages. If you're using an extension like ManaDev for your facet navigation, this can be achieved fairly easily and allows you to add a block of text to each filter applied on a page.

You should also look to request each of the incorrectly indexed URLs is removed from the index (although this does take a long time if you have a lot!).

We wrote a really long guide around launching a Magento website last month which may be of interest - https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/the-definitive-guide-to-launching-a-magento-website/. We've also done a guide on Common Magento SEO Issues here - https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/common-magento-seo-issues/ and I previously wrote a guide on setting Magento up for Search Engines on Moz - https://moz.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines (Although this is likely to be a little outdated now)

I hope this helps!
Lewis

BlueprintMarketing

There is a big difference between robots.txt and no index

"Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black )

But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior?"

_See http://i.imgur.com/114BHcR.png_

You need to use a no index tag not robots.txt ideally with a secular canonical pointing to the product.

Please see references one and two below. There are larger versions of the photos below as well

You need to run your site through deep crawl and or screaming frog SEO spider If you would be kind enough to give me the URL privately or publicly I will run a deep crawl and SEO spider

** This topic is difficult to explain without using the ability to show videos and images inside the box while describing this. That's why I recommend you view this YouTube video and slide share.**

Deep crawl is fantastic at solving these issues it has done this for other magenta clients of mine, and I strongly recommend utilizing what you've learned from that webinar and the other references below.

please see one and two below

larger versions of the images

I agree with Lewis's recommendation for an extension and have added a couple more.

I Hope this helps,

Thomas

78tExl8.png nMrYeUWlslY xJeFTbY.jpg wOHxaEE.jpg QprPUyk.jpg 114BHcR.png

HappyJackJr

Hi Lewis,

Firstly thank you for taking your time to respond in depth to my question.

Since reading your response, I have done the following...

Identified the parameters that should NOT be indexed, these are; 'brand=', 'min=' and 'max='

The colour filter 'colour=' is to be kept indexed. I have reviewed the website and found that users cannot currently select to filter more than on colour, which eliminates Google from indexing multiple colour filters in one URL.

However, users can still filter by colour and brand, hence why I have requested ours devs to meta noindex any URL that contains the 'brand=' parameter as well as any URLs that have the 'min/max=' parameters as these are price filters.

I have also requested rel=next/prev to be implemented correctly.

The above should drastically reduce our indexed content.

As well as this, I have added the following parameters into Search Consoles' URL Parameter tool as 'No Crawl', 'brand, min, max' - although I understand this is not a guaranteed fix, it was my first option with no immediate dev time over the weekend.

Now the only URLs in need of a canonical is the colour filtered URLs as 'brand, min max' are all noindex. I have asked dev to ensure the canonical points back to page 1 for now, however I am looking into a view-all page option so the canonical would point to that.

A good learning curve all of this!

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