Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?
-
I just got a Mozcrawl back and see lots of errors for overly dynamic urls. The site is a villa rental site that gives users the ability to search by bedroom, amenities, price, etc, so I'm wondering what the best way to keep these types of dynamically generated pages with urls like /property-search-page/?location=any&status=any&type=any&bedrooms=9&bathrooms=any&min-price=any&max-price=any from indexing.
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated : )
-
If you have a page that lists all the villas outside the search results, then you don't lose anything by blocking that folder on the robots.txt
But still, somebody, the guy that wrote the custom theme knows how to do the changes needed.
If you want I can help you with it, for free
Just PM me (I'll need FTP access). -
Having some trouble... Because the site is Wordpress, which dynamically generates pages, there is no /property-search-page/ nor is there a property-search-page.php in the editor files, so the only option I have is to put disallow: /property-search-page/ in the robots.txt file, correct?
-
You guys rock! I'll try these out tomorrow. Thanks a million.
-
If you have a /all-villas/ page then you should go ahead and noindex the search results as Google Guidelines suggests. You can either do it in the /property-search-page/ or using the robots.txt file.
In the robots.txt, add:
disallow: /property-search-page/
The robots method guarantees that no page inside that folder is indexed or even crawled (including /property-search-page/?whatever).
Or on the page /property-search-page/ you can add the meta noindex as such:
Then check if that meta tag is shown in all search results (just check a couple of them).
Hope that works!
-
Yes, it will. Also looks like custom code, it depends on how the header is coded. But it should work. Test it, if you can. This should solve your problems relatively easily. If nothing works, you can always do a robots.txt deny for /property-search-page/?* pages, but that's not a recommended solution. Try the canonical way to see if it works first.
-
We already have Yoast installed, but the errors are still showing up in the Moz report.
To clarify, let's assume we have another page that lists all the villas (/all-villas/). If I go to the property-search-page php file and canonical=rel it to /all-villas/, will it canonical=rel all /property-search-page/?whatever pages to the /all-villas/ page?
-
Well, that will make a little easier from one side and harder from the other.
You can try installing SEO by Yoast, that will put all the canonical tags for you, however, I think it won't link the search result pages to the canonical page that lists them all.
That might require a little coding.
If there's another page, outside /property-search-page/ folder that lists all villas, then you can disallow that folder in the robots.txt file, and that should fix it. If there isn't, well, then you will need to edit the /property-search-page/ page to use a static canonical tag that points to the page that lists all the villas removing any kind of filtering.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?
-
I agree with Federico one hundred percent. Figure out what your primary SEO friendly URLs are for these kinds of pages and canonical them back to that page.
-
I wouldn't put a noindex meta on them, instead I would consider using a canonical tag pointing to the page that lists all the villas.
Anyway, what programming language are you using?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
Hey Moz, It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis! I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly. Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles. So the situation is this. Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/ Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf So to note, the product ID will always remain the same. Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal. So the potential solution we thought was: we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux. Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input! Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | MH-UK0 -
What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?
Hello all, we have a client which is a sports website. In fact it is a veyr big website and has a huge number of news per day. This is mostly the reason why it refreshes some of its pages with news list every 420 seconds. We currently use meta refresh. I have read here and elsewhere that meta refreshes should be avoided. But we don't do it to send to another page and pass any kind of page authority / juice. Is in this case javascript refresh better? Is there any other better way. What do you think & suggest? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | pkontopoulos0 -
URLs in Greek, Greeklish or English? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you. Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding. The question is about the URLs of Greek websites. According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages. To give you an example let's look at A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks. On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)! So the question is: For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ? Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Lenia
Technical SEO | | tevag0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Should i Noindex my privacy policy page?:
Hi, We have a privacy policy page but it can be found at Copyscape and might affect Google Panda content farming. My questions is, should i Noindex my private policy page?:
Technical SEO | | chanel270 -
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
Technical SEO | | jkundrotas0 -
Drupal URL Aliases vs 301 Redirects + Do URL Aliases create duplicates?
Hi all! I have just begun work on a Drupal site which heavily uses the URL Aliases feature. I fear that it is creating duplicate links. For example:: we have http://www.URL.com/index.php and http://www.URL.com/ In addition we are about to switch a lot of links and want to keep the search engine benefit. Am I right in thinking URL aliases change the URL, while leaving the old URL live and without creating search engine friendly redirects such as 301s? Thanks for any help! Christian
Technical SEO | | ChristianMKTG0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0