{"id":76810,"date":"2025-02-09T00:37:53","date_gmt":"2025-02-09T00:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/business\/marketing\/googles-advice-on-fixing-unwanted-indexed-urls\/"},"modified":"2025-02-09T00:37:53","modified_gmt":"2025-02-09T00:37:53","slug":"googles-advice-on-fixing-unwanted-indexed-urls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=76810","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s Advice on Fixing Unwanted Indexed URLs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"narrow-cont\">\n<p>An SEO posted details about a site audit in which he critiqued the use of a rel=canonical for controlling what pages are indexed on a site. The SEO proposed using noindex to get the pages dropped from Google\u2019s index and then adding the individual URLs to robots.txt. Google\u2019s John Mueller suggested a solution that goes in a different direction.<\/p>\n<h2>Site Audit Reveals Indexed Add To Cart URLs<\/h2>\n<p>An SEO audit uncovered that over half of the client\u2019s 1.43k indexed pages were paginated and \u201cadd to shopping cart\u201d URLs (the kind with question marks at the end of them). Google ignored the rel=canonical link attributes and indexed the pages, which illustrated the point that rel=canonical is just a hint and not a directive. Paginated in this case just means the dynamically generated URLs related to when a site visitor orders a page by brand or size or whatever (this is usually referred to as faceted navigation).<\/p>\n<p><em>The add to shopping cart URLs\u00a0 looked like this:<\/em><\/p>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">example.com\/product\/page-5\/?add-to-cart=example<\/pre>\n<p>The client had implemented a rel=canonical link attribute to tell Google that another URL was the correct URL to index.<\/p>\n<p><em>The SEO\u2019s solution:<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cHow I plan on fixing this is to no-index all these pages and once that\u2019s done block them in the robots.txt\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe class=\"sej-iframe-auto-height\" id=\"in-content-iframe\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/wp-json\/sscats\/v2\/tk\/Middle_Post_Text\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2>SEO Decisions Depend On Details<\/h2>\n<p>One of the most tired and boring SEO dad jokes is \u201cit depends.\u201d But saying \u201cit depends\u201d is no joke when it\u2019s followed by what something depends on and that\u2019s the crucial detail that John Mueller added to a LinkedIn discussion that already had 83 responses to it.<\/p>\n<p>The original discussion, by an SEO who\u2019d just finished an audit, addresses the technical challenges associated with controlling what gets crawled and indexed by Google and why rel=canonical is not an unreliable solution because it is a suggestion and not a directive.<\/p>\n<p>A directive is a command that Google is obligated to follow, like a meta noindex rule. A rel=canonical link attribute is not a directive, it\u2019s treated as a hint for Google to use for deciding what to index.<\/p>\n<p>The problem that the original post described was about managing a high number of dynamically generated posts that were slipping into Google\u2019s index.<\/p>\n<h2>John Mueller On Dealing With Unwanted Indexed URLs<\/h2>\n<p>Mueller\u2019s take on the problem was to suggest the importance of reviewing the URLs for patterns that may give a clue as to why unwanted URLs are getting indexed and then applying a more granular (specific) solution.<\/p>\n<p><em>He advised:<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cYou seem to have a lot of comments here already, so my 2 cents are more as a random bystander\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 I\u2019d review the URLs for patterns and look at specifics, rather than to treat this as a random list of URLs that you want canonicalized. These are not random, using a generic solution won\u2019t be optimal for any site \u2013 ideally you\u2019d do something specific for this particular situation. Aka \u201cit depends\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 In particular, you seem to have a lot of \u2018add to cart\u2019 URLs \u2013 you can just block these with the URL pattern via robots.txt. You don\u2019t need to canonicalize them, they should ideally not be crawled during a normal crawl (it messes up your metrics too).<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 There\u2019s some amount of pagination, filtering in URL parameters too \u2013 check out our documentation on options for that.<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 For more technical rabbit holes, check out https:\/\/search-off-the-record.libsyn.com\/handling-dupes-same-same-or-different \u201c<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>Why Was Google Indexing URLs With Query Parameters?<\/h2>\n<p>A topic raised by multiple people in the LinkedIn discussion is the problem of Google indexing shopping cart URLs (add to shopping cart URLs). No answers were provided but it may be something particular to the shopping cart platform and solving that may be limited to the above described solutions.<\/p>\n<p>Read <a href=\"https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/google-shopping-cart-urls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">John Mueller\u2019s advice here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An SEO posted details about a site audit in which he critiqued the use of a rel=canonical for controlling what pages are indexed on a site. The SEO proposed using noindex to get the pages dropped from Google\u2019s index and then adding the individual URLs to robots.txt. Google\u2019s John Mueller suggested a solution that goes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[11282,8488,13754,39235,11683,14426],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-76810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","tag-advice","tag-fixing","tag-googles","tag-indexed","tag-unwanted","tag-urls"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Google\u2019s Advice on Fixing Unwanted Indexed URLs - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=76810\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Google\u2019s Advice on Fixing Unwanted Indexed URLs - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An SEO posted details about a site audit in which he critiqued the use of a rel=canonical for controlling what pages are indexed on a site. 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