Overdynamic Pages - How to Solve it?

[JoaoCJ]

Hi everyone,

I'm running a classified real estate ads site, where people can publish their apartment or house they want to sell, so we use multiple filters to help people find what they want.

Lately we added multiple filters to the URL to make the search more precise, things like:

• Prices (priceAmount=###)

• Bedrooms (BedroomsNumber=2)

• Bathrooms (BathroomsNumber=3)

• TotalArea (totalArea=1_50)
• Services (Elevator, CommonAreas, security)

Among other Filters so you see the picture, all this filters are on the URL so that people can share their search on multiple social media, that makes two problems for moz crawl:

• Overdynamic URLs
• Too long URLs

Now what would be a good solution for this 2 problems, would a canonical to the original page before the "?" would be ok?

Example:
http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium

The problem I have with this solution is that I also have a pagination parameter (page=2), and I'm using prev and next tags, if I use a such canonical will break the prev and next tag?

http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium&**page=2**

Also thinking if adding a noindex on pages with paramters could also be an option.

Thanks a lot, I'm trying to address this issues.

[matt-elshaw]

Hi,

In your situation the canonical option would be the best way to handle those filtering options. Essentially, any time a filter (bedrooms, price etc) is used, the resulting page should canonical back to the original page (with no filtering options).

On the original page you can then use rel=next/prev tags to indicate the relationship between the pages. You will not need to add rel=next/prev tags to pages that use filtering options, as these will all have a canonical tag pointing to the original version of the page with no filtering options.

Hope this helps!
Matt

[Travis_Bailey]

Matthew is quite correct, but I think the response was a bit incomplete. I'm given to the same thing at times.

Anyway, read this. That should get you up to speed on faceted navigation.

[JoaoCJ]

Thanks a lot Mathew for your response,

So, just for clarification:

Example 1:
If i have this page (http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?&**page=2**) with only pagination parameter:

I don't have to use the rel canonical towards: http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades since i'm using prev and next tags on all this pagination pages.

Example 2:
If I have a page with multiple filters + pagination (http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium&**page=2**), is OK to canonical towards the main page since pagination will not be used.

Please let me know if my examples are correct.
Thanks.

[matt-elshaw]

Hi,

In Example 1, each page should use self referencing canonical tags in addition to pagination tags.So for example:

URL: http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades

**URL: http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?&page=2 **
<link rel="canonical" href="http: urbania.pe="" buscar="" venta-de-propiedades?&page="2""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

And so on.....

In Example 2, for pages with pagination + filtering, canonical tags should point to the the relevant page of results without filtering. So for example:

URL: http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium
<link rel="canonical" href="http: urbania.pe="" buscar="" venta-de-propiedades"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

URL: http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium&page=2
<link rel="canonical" href="http: urbania.pe="" buscar="" venta-de-propiedades?&page="2""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

Hope this isnt too confusing

Thanks,
Matt