Crawl Budget and Faceted Navigation
-
Hi, we have an ecommerce website with facetted navigation for the various options available.
Google has 3.4 million webpages indexed. Many of which are over 90% duplicates.
Due to the low domain authority (15/100) Google is only crawling around 4,500 webpages per day, which we would like to improve/increase.
We know, in order not to waste crawl budget we should use the robots.txt to disallow parameter URL’s (i.e. ?option=, ?search= etc..). This makes sense as it would resolve many of the duplicate content issues and force Google to only crawl the main category, product pages etc.
However, having looked at the Google Search Console these pages are getting a significant amount of organic traffic on a monthly basis.
Is it worth disallowing these parameter URL’s in robots.txt, and hoping that this solves our crawl budget issues, thus helping to index and rank the most important webpages in less time.
Or is there a better solution?
Many thanks in advance.
Lee.
-
Hello, I have also been in a similar situation. What I did was to disallow the urls with parameters using the robots.txt and place (in only the pages with parameters) the following two html tags:
This will expressly indicate to google not to index these pages. I still have some errors but I guess they will disappear in a few months.
Regards
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
-
Google Webmaster tools -Fixing over 20,000+ crawl errors
Hi, I'm trying to gather all the 404 crawl errors on my website after a recent hacking that I've been trying to rectify and clean up. Webmaster tools states that I have over 20 000+ crawl errors. I can only download a sample of 1000 errors. Is there any way to get the full list instead of correcting 1000 errors, marking them as fixed and waiting for the next batch of 1000 errors to be listed in Webmaster tools? The current method is quite timely and I want to take care of all errors in one shot instead of over a course of a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
Duplicate content issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
H2 vs. H3 Tags for Category Navigation
Hey, all. I have client that uses tags in the navigation for its blog. For example, tags might appear around "Library," "Recent Posts," etc. This is handled through their WordPress theme. This seems fairly standard, but I wonder whether tags are semantically appropriate. Since each blog post is fairly lengthy (about 500-1000 words) with multiple tags, would it be more appropriate to use tags for this menu navigation? Are we cutting into the effectiveness of our tags by using them for menu navigation? The navigation is certainly an important page element, and it structures content, so it seems that it should use some header tag. Anyways, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. I'm a content creator, not an SEO, so this is a bit out of my skillset.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
Can't crawl website with Screaming frog... what is wrong?
Hello all - I've just been trying to crawl a site with Screaming Frog and can't get beyond the homepage - have done the usual stuff (turn off JS and so on) and no problems there with nav and so on- the site's other pages have indexed in Google btw. Now I'm wondering whether there's a problem with this robots.txt file, which I think may be auto-generated by Joomla (I'm not familiar with Joomla...) - are there any issues here? [just checked... and there isn't!] If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at e.g. www.example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be moved to the site root at e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt AND the joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/ For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html For syntax checking, see: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /layouts/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /tmp/0 -
Pages with rel "next"/"prev" still crawling as duplicate?
Howdy! I have a site that is crawling as "duplicate content pages" that is really just pagination. The rel next/prev is in place and done correctly but Roger Bot and Google are both showing duplicated content + duplicate page titles & meta's respectively. The only thing I can think of is we have a canonical pointing back at the URL you are on - we do not have a view all option right now and would not feel comfortable recommending it given the speed implications and size of their catalog. Any experience, recommendations here? Something to be worried about? /collections/all?page=15"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paul-bold0 -
Stop Google crawling a site at set times
Hi All I know I can use robots.txt to block Google from pages on my site but is there a way to stop Google crawling my site at set times of the day? Or to request that they crawl at other times? Thanks Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ske110 -
Old pages still crawled by SE returning 404s. Better to put 301 or block with robots.txt ?
Hello guys, A client of ours has thousand of pages returning 404 visibile on googl webmaster tools. These are all old pages which don't exist anymore but Google keeps on detecting them. These pages belong to sections of the site which don't exist anymore. They are not linked externally and didn't provide much value even when they existed What do u suggest us to do: (a) do nothing (b) redirect all these URL/folders to the homepage through a 301 (c) block these pages through the robots.txt. Are we inappropriately using part of the crawling budget set by Search Engines by not doing anything ? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | H-FARM0 -
What would cause a drastic drop in pages crawled per day?
The site didn't go down. There were no drop in rankings, or traffic. But we went from averaging 150,000 pages crawled per day, to ~1000 pages crawled per day. We're now back up to ~100,000 crawled per day, but we went more than a week with only 1000 pages being crawled daily. The question is, what could cause this drastic (but temporary) reduction in pages crawled?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatwallet0