Magento Layered Navigation & Duplicate Content

[alexandalexaseo]

Hello Dear SeoMoz,

I would like to ask your help with something that I am not sure off. Our ecommerce web site is built with Magento. I have found many problems so far and I know that there will be many more in the future. Currently, I am trying to find the best way to deal with the duplicate content that is produced from the layered navigation (size, gender etc). I have done a lot of research so far in order to understand which might be the best practice and I found the following practices:

• **Block layered navigation URLSs from the Google Webmaster Tools (**Apparently this works for Google Only).
• Block these URLs with the robots.txt file
• Make links no-follow
• **Make links JavaScript from Magento ***
• Avoid including these links in the xml site map.
• Avoid including these link in the A-Z Product Index.
• Canonical tag
• Meta Tags (noindex, nofollow)

Question

If I turn the layered navigation links into JavaScript links from the Magento Admin, the layered navigation links are still found by the crawlers but they look like that:

|

http://www.mysite.com/#

instead of:

http://www.mysite.com/girls-basics.html?gender_filte...

|

Can these new URLS (http://www.mysite.com/# ) solve the duplicate content problems with the layered navigation or do I need to implement other practices too to make sure that everything is done right.

Kind Regards

Stefanos Anastasiadis

[wissamdandan]

I don't know if you stumble upon this Extension,

but it may resolve your problems.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/EcommerceTeam/extension/4420/layered_navigation_seo

[alexandalexaseo]

Thanks a lot for your reply. I already know this extension but it is not what I am looking for.

[hiphound]

Stefanos:

Hi! Did you ever find an answer to this question? I have a Magento install as well and need some advanced technical SEO. Are you working with a Magento consultant at all?

Thanks!

Lynn

[MikiP]

From what I can gather about Magento is the Layered Nav can create seemingly endless URL's.  Even if you were to use one of the modules created to make them 'friendly', you would still technically have reems of duplicate pages...right?  All nicely re-written but effectively with the same titles and meta...

You may be able to put a wildcard disallow in the robots file for the parameter 'dir=' , which is associated with all the filters.  I dont know how well this will work or if Google may on occasision ignore this or find a way into the layered pages anyway?  Does anyone know?  What if the spider entered the site through a direct link to filtered page...would the robots.txt file go by the way side in this instance?

You could in theory also use WMT to dictate that Google does not index pages with the 'dir=' parameter.  Again, I am not sure as to the success rate using this.

Its one of those areas that has many open and unaswered discussions but nothing definitive anywhere to address the issue.  Yet Magento is very popular and as you look at people sites who use it you can see they have some how found a way to sort this out.  Id love to be a fly on the wall in their office!

[JoshAsteteWebFullCircle]

I'm not sure if you guys found a solution to this but I've used Mageworx with my Magento sites and it seems to handle everything I need.  I do have to do some Mod-rewrites but nothing too much for a developer to handle.

[GoMage]

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