Hi there,
Have a website that currently allows product filtering that does so via a number of options, however these all load a new page in order to filter the results, and do so in the format: category/filter1/1.html
The issue I have is that there are about 20 of these filters in each category, and as a filter is selected by a user it loads a new page. If a user adds two filters it loads:
/filter1/filter2/1.html
However, if they click the filters in reverse order it loads:
/filter2/filter1/1.html
Both return the same page of products in the same list-order, with the order of the filters within the URL itself determined by the order in which users added them. I've a suspicion that Google would start wasting time following all these possible URLs and wasting crawl time/think I had a tonne of duplicated content on-site.
I'm wondering how to prevent this turning into an infinite crawl space for Google; I've already set a preferred version of these URL combinations as canonical, but Google is still going to waste time loading all these pages to find them then see the canonical tag.
Does anybody have experience of using directories instead of URL parameters in this way, and in improving crawl efficiency in these circumstances?
Current idea: stop google crawling past the first filter, so all products can be found, but this would cut off longer-tail opportunities for '[brand] [product] between [lower and upper price]' the site. Any good? Or just dumb?
Have a website that currently allows product filtering that does so via a number of options, however these all load a new page in order to filter the results, and do so in the format: category/filter1/1.html
The issue I have is that there are about 20 of these filters in each category, and as a filter is selected by a user it loads a new page. If a user adds two filters it loads:
/filter1/filter2/1.html
However, if they click the filters in reverse order it loads:
/filter2/filter1/1.html
Both return the same page of products in the same list-order, with the order of the filters within the URL itself determined by the order in which users added them. I've a suspicion that Google would start wasting time following all these possible URLs and wasting crawl time/think I had a tonne of duplicated content on-site.
I'm wondering how to prevent this turning into an infinite crawl space for Google; I've already set a preferred version of these URL combinations as canonical, but Google is still going to waste time loading all these pages to find them then see the canonical tag.
Does anybody have experience of using directories instead of URL parameters in this way, and in improving crawl efficiency in these circumstances?
Current idea: stop google crawling past the first filter, so all products can be found, but this would cut off longer-tail opportunities for '[brand] [product] between [lower and upper price]' the site. Any good? Or just dumb?