Can I safely block my product listing from search? Does it even make sense?

[GhillC]

Hi,

I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages.

Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories.

My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views:  8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages).

Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)?

Thanks,
G

[effectdigital]

Can you explain the difference between the 'products listings' and the 'actual products themselves'?

You say you still want products and product categories to rank, but not product listings. But to most readers, a product listing is usually a product category or product page (so the info seems to contradict itself, which actually it may not do - just needs more explaining)

[GhillC]

A product page is a page speaking about a selected product.
Example: a page about the smartphone Samguns Supernova 30

A product category is a page speaking about the category, or the type of product it falls into.
Example: smartphone or, if it is too broad, the Supernova line

A product listing is a page listing all the product refined with available criterias such as a product line.
Example: a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones
Or a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones with more than 128GB of HD.
Etc.

Does it make more sense?

[Everett]

Hello GhillC,

I think we need to agree on terminology first, but it sounds like you can safely limit some of Google's access. Some people call your "product listing pages" either "refinements", "facets", or "filters". When I read "product listing pages" I typically think of what is also called a "category" page, which is a page listing multiple products. A single product page is often referred to as a product detail page (PDP).

Now that we're on the same page (pun intended), let me know if this article answers your question. It is very dated (2011) but gets the point across, which is that you need to be strategic about which facets/refinements/filters you allow to be crawled and/or indexed: https://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck .

One more thing: 5% - 9% of traffic going directly from organic search into a page type would be considered significant for most businesses. When I look at pruning out page types, they're typically responsible for less than 0.5% of traffic from organic search.

[GhillC]

Thanks for your answer and the link, that's actually very useful.
What I mainly struggle with is to understand what I can prune/not and based on what criterias. And the article you've linked is helping a fair bit on that aspect.

I'm thinking to start on multiple filter pages with a rule such as "block product listing pages from being indexed if at least 2 filters have been selected". And then see how it impacts the site and my crawl budget.

[effectdigital]

Have had a lot of success with that kind of deeper logic in the past, you can usually quite easily create such rules using robots.txt wildcards