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?page=all / foundation


kealan

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Hello All,

 

I am having a bit of an issue with the SEO for our site. All categories have a ?page=all variant which in the foundation skin does not go anywhere or do anything. Therefore I have pages competing against themselves for position as the rel canonicals are not working in these cases and it is identified as a separate page.  How I mean not working here is for example .... www.examplestore.com/prodcuts/product.html?page=all ....  should rel canonical to www.examplestore.com/prodcuts/product.html  but instead includes the pagination of ?page=all identifying it as a separate and unique page.

I know this issue was discussed previously last year, however it was not in the context of the foundation skin where the pagination actually has no function and serves no purpose.

I have tried to 301 the urls with ?page=all but have not had any success so far  

Any steer here would be very much appreciated.

 

Kealan  

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Hi Kealan

1) CubeCart should handle the rel canonicals correctly but I have seen this quite often along with "?_a=" variations so I suggest opening up a github issue for this to get it checked and fixed in a future release

2) I dont how you build your sitemaps, the software we sell allows you to specify urls to exclude if they contain matching strings, so "?_a=" and "?_page=" are the first two we add when configuring it (this is just one of a huge number of reasons to get specialist sitemap software rather than use the built in functionality)

3) You can also specifically tell Google via Webmaster Tools (called Search Console now !) to ignore certain URL Parameters and this should also be done (but carefully and knowing what you are doing or you can exclude a LOT of urls that you didnt want to exclude !)

Ian

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Hello Ian,

 

Thanks a million for your quick reply. In response; 

1.) Great idea I will raise this in git asap 

2.) I do no use the inbuilt sitemap generator, I generate them externally and manually adjust if needed. No urls with pagination etc. have ever been submitted for this site its the crawlers that are picking them up over time. Only realised this issue after we moved the site to a new url, which started off amazingly but over time we seem to be cannibalising our own seo with duplicate results which is starting to hurt our positions. 

3.) From reading a long conversation posted here about a year ago with you Brian and DB, I decided the url parameters might not be ideal - I don't know what I'm doing here enough to go down this route unless there's any advice that can be dispensed at this point. 

 

Kealan 

 

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If you can agree that the "More..." button is not the preferred method of getting more/all content to show for your site, there is a recent discussion on a small edit to the skin (already coded to do this) to show Standard Pagination on Foundation. Then the canonical for page=all might be of some benefit.

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Hi Brian,

I can agree that the "More" is not an ideal exclusive method of handling pagination, page=all makes sense and is workable if the parameter actually had the function of displaying all items hidden by 'More.." as it stands its entirely redundant in foundation. 

We have customers get lost when the item they clicked for via a search engine, is one or more "More.." clicks down the page. So they think its not there, our chat tool is getting a good work out and so is our search box. 

On the other hand its a very slick implementation and I think for the casual shopper its an enjoyable function especially on mobile. 

At heart I don't want it to go but it is causing issue in its current form and needs to be addressed, as we moved URL recently I have been studying our SERP like a hawk. When we first moved and Google had largely only the indexed pages to work off our search engine positions were amazing, never better. As time went on the page=all urls started sneaking in, and on each and every search query they appeared, positions plunged due to the canonical failing to identify it as the same page ad the non page=all url.    

 

Edited by kealan
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Hi Ian, 

 

I have altered how webmaster tools is interacting with the 'page' parameter so this is now discounted and only the primary page is indexed. I am not 100% that this is exactly the behaviour I am looking for as this will now discount page=2/3/4 etc , which do have valid functions in foundation skin, but its definitely a step in the right direction as its was only the page=all that were being indexed and causing problem. Given the observed impact to SEO I will update again in the next few weeks and advise if I have seen a recovery as this issue is probably widespread, again the only reason I picked it up is we moved domain name and was able to gauge the effect of the crawled pages being added on top of the initially indexed pages.  

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