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Thank you!

Haha, I think the train passed the station on that one. I would have realised eventually... XD

Thanks for your help!

Yep, have done. (Briefly mentioned in my previous response.) Doesn't pass

I thought so too, but according to Google the trailing wildcard is completely unnecessary, and only needs to be used mid-URL.

Hi Andy,

Disallowing them would be my first priority really, before removing from index. Didn't want to remove them before I've blocked Google from crawling them in case they get added back again next time Google comes a-crawling, as has happened before when I've simply removed a URL here and there. Does that make sense or am I getting myself mixed up here?

My other hack of a solution would be to check the URL in the page.php, and if URL includes par1=ABC then insert noindex meta tag. (Not sure if that would work well or not...)

Hi Martijn, thanks for your response!

I'm currently looking at something like this...

**user-agent: *** #disallowing page.php and any parameters after it
disallow: /page.php #but leaving anything that starts with par1=ABC
allow: /page.php?par1=ABC

I would have thought that you could disallow things broadly like that and give an exception, as you can with files in disallowed folders. But it's not passing Google's robots.txt Tester.

One thing that's probably worth mentioning really is that there are only two variables that I want to allow of the par1 parameter. For example's sake, ABC123 and ABC456. So would need to be either a partial match or "this or that" kinda deal, disallowing everything else.

So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them.

Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789=

All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe?

Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?

This is great advice. And don't forget in Search Console (Webmaster Tools) under Crawl in the sidebar you can use the URL Parameters tool to tell Google which parameters are used to paginate. You're directly telling Google then that that's how you would like those pages to be seen. In addition to using rel="prev"/"next".

I agree with Nitin here.

I think the confusion is perhaps that you're taking the pyramid structure in that Moz article too literally? There is nothing wrong with linking between different pages as Nitin said. In fact, by linking to related/relevant content on your website, you are enforcing the context and the meaning of the pages' content. The diagram in the Moz article is just showing how you should have the minimum number of links possible between the homepage and any given "deep" page on the website. So, using Moz's diagram as an example, from that website's homepage, you can get to their deepest page in only three clicks. The more clicks (or links) the harder the page is to find, and therefore less likely to be found and crawled by Google. Remember that Google has a crawl budget.

So long as you don't have hundreds of links on any one page you are trying to rank and it doesn't take too many links to get to any one page, I wouldn't worry too much it. The nofollow attribute is only to be used when you don't want Google to follow that link and pass link juice between the pages.

If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?

I would suggest performing a full audit report of your homepage to find all the little bits you may have missed, if you're really unsure. What have you done so far to optimise the homepage?

I'm confused. Why would you want to noindex all of those pages? If you don't want those pages to be indexed by Google, tagging them noindex is not harmful at all. But why would you want to noindex the front page, category, subcategory and product page?

There are so many factors to consider:

• The website you're blogging on:

• Quality

• Relevance

• Authority

• Your guest post itself:

• Quality

• Relevance

• Other outbound links

• The link to your website:

• Anchor text

• The page it's going to

Those are the basics of the basics, but just to get you looking at link building in a better way. But the drop in traffic isn't necessarily attributed to the link building you've been doing either, and you need to take a closer look at everything.

The question you should be asking with every link "built" is: **Is anyone actually going to benefit from this link? **Will anyone see it? Does it provide any value to anyone? Would anyone actually click this, and would they be satisfied with the page it takes them to?

If no, then it probably comes across as spammy.

I'd recommend linking to all your own properties using rel="me". You can see the tag in common usage on Twitter and Instagram  profiles, where the user's website link is tagged using rel="me". You can basically connect up all your online properties as belonging to the same person/brand/entity - and who wouldn't want that. You're indicating to Google that all those webpages are related to you. By linking to your social profiles from your website using rel="me", you're confirming that those profiles are officially yours.

I would  recommend www.website.com/shop being the easier URL to rank, as subdomains tend to rank a bit more like a brand new website than a new section of an existing website.