Google tries to crawl links from style variation chooser menu

[Kirby]

Affected version

2.3.4

We nofollow the links and noindex the pages. Google doesn't listen or care. There's not a whole lot more that we can do out of the box, but blocking the pages via robots.txt should help.

This does not really help:
If crawling is blocked via robots.txt Google still indexes those pages without crawling even though the links are nofollow.

What could help:
Don't use links for live switching; either omit href in this case or do not use <a> at all.
Live switching is done via JS exclusively, so those links are not required in this case.

 

[Anurag Kashyap]

This does not really help:
If crawling is blocked via robots.txt Google still indexes those pages without crawling even though the links are nofollow.

What could help:
Don't use links for live switching; either omit href in this case or do not use <a> at all.
Live switching is done via JS exclusively, so those links are not required in this case.

You're right! If you're using JavaScript for live switching, there's no need for those links to have href attributes. Omitting them or using another method to trigger the switch would be cleaner and avoid unnecessary crawling.