Issues with Magento layered navigation

[tidybooks]

Hi,

We use Magento v.1.7 for our store. We have recently had an SEO audit and we have uncovered 2 major issues which can be pinpointed to our layered navigation. We use the MANAdev layered navigation module. There are numerous options available to help with SEO. All our filtered urls seem to be fine ie. https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/colour/natural-finish-with-letters/letters/lowercase have canonical url correctly setup and the meta tags as noindex, follow  but Magento is churning out tons of 404 error pages like this https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/show/12/l/colour:24-4-9/letters:6-7 which google  is indexing

I'm at lost at how to solve this any help would be great. Thank you

**This is from our SEO audit report **

The faceted navigation isn’t handled correctly and causes two major issues:● One of the faceted navigation filters causes 404 error. This means that the error isappended each sequence of the navigation options, multiplying the faulty URLs.● The pages created by the faceted nav are all accessible to the search engines. Thismeans that there are hundreds of duplicated category pages created by one of theparameters. The duplication issues can seriously hinder the organic visibility.The amount of 404 errors and the duplicated pages created by faceted navigation makes italmost impossible for a search engine crawler to finish the crawl. This means that the sitemight not be fully indexed and the newly introduced product pages or content won’t bediscovered for a very long time.

[MickEdwards]

"Magento is churning out tons of 404 error pages like this https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/show/12/l/colour:24-4-9/letters:6-7 which google  is indexing"

That page is returning a 404 header response so it does not exist.  Therefore Google cannot index it.

Without seeing Magento it's difficult to be certain what settings you have and/if you have a bug.

What you can do (maybe you have) is to add the attributes into Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters and set to no URLs.  You could also add the directory /sort-by/ to robots.txt to disallow.

Using your example of https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/colour/natural-finish-with-letters/letters/lowercase, well this has an internal rewrite to https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/letters/lowercase?colour=20 which is not indexed.

It looks like not only do you need to resolve any MANAdev issues but you need to do an audit on the site as I think you have several issues.

[tidybooks]

Thanks Michael for the response. Excuse my poor description by indexing I was refereeing to my ever growing list of crawl errors.

When you say "It looks like not only do you need to resolve any MANAdev issues but you need to do an audit on the site as I think you have several issues."

Is there some obvious errors you can see?

Thanks