CMS dynamicly created pages indexed?

[paul-bold]

Hey Moz'erz,

Looking at the indexed pages of my clients eCommerce website I noticed that dynamically created pages are being indexed.

For example this page does not "exist" but is created by a drop down filter menu that sorts by product tag:

/collections/tools/TAG

I can only conclude that this page got indexed either through a backlink or once upon a time there was an internal link pointing to this URL and got indexed (currently there is not). Are either of these cases possibilities?

In either case before considering removal or any action I would of-course reference analytics to check for conversions, traffic and any backlinks for those "pages".

I believe at the end of the day is recommend a drop down filer that doesn't create new pages as the best solution.

Thoughts, comments and experience is greatly welcomed

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Dylan

Either of those are possibilities for Google finding and indexing a page like that. There could be many ways that happened - I've seen them spider "links" in a drop down depending on how it's implemented.

One thing you can do to check how, is looked at the text-only cache of the page (type cache:www.domain.com/page-name in your browser and click text only) - and look to see if the drop down items actually appear and clickable links. You can also try crawling the site with Screaming Frog and set the user-agent to GoogleBot and see if they got picked up.

If the filter is just for example re-sorting the list of items in a category, there is probably not a need to have this crawled or indexed, because it's just the same content in a different order.

If you do want to remove them from the index, you will want to add a meta noindex tag to the HTML, wait for them to drop out of the index, and then block crawling with robots.txt or nofollow the links that might be generated.

Hope that helps!

EDIT - I'd also check to be sure they are not showing up in your XML sitemap.