Overly-Dynamic URL

[dellamoda]

Hi,

We have over 5000 pages showing under

Overly-Dynamic URL error

Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like,

http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y

http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all

http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3

Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there?

like:

Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y

if not how far into the url should be disallowed?

So far we have added the following to our robots,txt

Disallow: /?sort=title

Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y

Disallow: /?sort=price

Disallow: /?clearall=Y

Just not sure if they are correct.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,Kami

[SebastianCowie]

Hi Kami,

It's unfortunate, but a number of modern day e-commerce platforms still suffer from poor canonicalisation and multiple URL's.

If possible, rather than blocking off access to those queries via robots.txt or meta, I'd start by trying to specify a canonical URL when a query is created.

E.G

Query: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all
Canonical: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html

Failing that I'd try to implement a "follow,noindex" meta tag or via x-robots if you're any good with apache.

If that's still a no go, then try GWT, Google is getting much better at handling dynamic URL's within e-commerce platforms and you can specify which queries Google should ignore directly within GWT

There's a great post on Moz that deals with e-commerce and canonicalisation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/qa-from-ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues-webinar - I'd suggest starting there!

As a last resort I'd look to block the URL's within robots.txt, but this prevents crawlers from flowing freely within your site and can result in poor indexation.