Riparian Posted September 25, 2018 Share Posted September 25, 2018 This is a little difficult to explain. I have a retail site with about 1000 products. the flow of the site is index>product display > product details > shopping cart > and so on When I try to make a sitemap or other similar programs such as seo powersuite the program finds over 6000 (before i stop it) entries with up to up to 100 links per item because it and the search engines are finding one link on.... page 1 model number 1 ....then page 2 with model number 1..... then page 3 with model number 1 ..... and so on Ad Infinitum What is worse is that the bots also do the same thing on the product display page which I can only assume that google is not too keen on . This has all been created because when I wrote the program dirty URL's was not heard of and now it is too late to change This is something I have struggled with for years but I am hoping that there might be a work around but would like an expert opinion. My Questions is : by putting "noindex" on the product display page it completely stops this behavior BUT..... will this be a real negative to the SEO (not that it could be worse because August 1 algo killed the business anyway !! ) Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 25, 2018 Share Posted September 25, 2018 Use canonical URLs. The crawlers will hit every URL they can come across, that's fine, it happens, but you can instruct them whether there is a canonical URL for a resource. Here, the canonical URL would be the one with just the model number. Every page will use that same one (per product) canonical page and eventually the bots will understand that your site isn't full of duplicate pages. 2 minutes ago, Riparian said: This has all been created because when I wrote the program dirty URL's was not heard of and now it is too late to change Actually it isn't too late. If you don't mind a small decrease in SEO temporarily then you can fix this. Want to? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riparian Posted September 25, 2018 Author Share Posted September 25, 2018 Hi requinix and thank you for replying I actually have canonicals set up in "product display" and assumed that this would solve the problems but no luck unfortunately I cannot use a canonical in "product details" because in "details" it needs the model number which is passed from "display" . Each time the "details" program is accessed without a model number it produces an error so I am assuming that if a bot gets the error message this would be worse that multiple internal links ?? Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 25, 2018 Share Posted September 25, 2018 What you're saying doesn't make sense. These pages MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a&cart=p4033a MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a&page=1 MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a&page=2 rel= MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a&page=2 rel=&JumpTo=p4033a MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a&page=2&JumpTo=p4033a MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a&page=32 should all have a rel=canonical to MyProductsPage.php?model=p4033a Same for the others according to the model number. There is no reason MyProductsPage.php would not be able to do that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riparian Posted September 25, 2018 Author Share Posted September 25, 2018 So it is ok to have <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mysite/ MyProductsPage.php ? model_number= <?php echo $model_number ?>"/> ??? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 25, 2018 Share Posted September 25, 2018 Yeah. Of course Don't make it self-closing like that, HTML stopped doing that years ago, but otherwise it's exactly what you should be doing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riparian Posted September 25, 2018 Author Share Posted September 25, 2018 I am afraid that did not help :( I have set the product_display_page to <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mysite.com.au/great_xxxx.php?page=<?php echo $page ?>"> and the product_details-page to <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mysite.com.au/expand_xxx.php?model=<?php echo $model ?>"> but as you can see from the attached screen shot it has made no difference to the sitemap information and I assume that the robots will see the same thing... thousands of them. Any thoughts ? Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 25, 2018 Share Posted September 25, 2018 Where is the sitemap information coming from? You know that setting up canonical URLs won't fix everything in a day? It will take a while for engines to catch up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riparian Posted September 25, 2018 Author Share Posted September 25, 2018 The sitemap is coming from seo powersuite website auditor but it is the same in other programs I can find to check the site . I have tried to fix this many many times over the years on different forums but have never found a way to stop it from duplicating the urls that have parameters after the .php extension. I am in penalty (even though they do not call it that) at the moment and believe that this may well be contributing to the problem. My site has dropped from position one for all 20 main keywords to not even ranking for my most important keywords.... hence why I simply must find a fix cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 26, 2018 Share Posted September 26, 2018 Canonical URLs should fix your duplication problem. Is this live on a site somewhere we (or I) can see? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Riparian Posted September 26, 2018 Author Share Posted September 26, 2018 Can I PM you ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 26, 2018 Share Posted September 26, 2018 Sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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