Pages listed by Google

[lightbox]

Hi,

when I search Google for "site:www.mysite.com" (where mysite would be my domain name, of course), I see lots of pages listed which aren't that interesting for a search engine, imho.

Examples:

• /forumname.2/?direction=asc
• /forumname.2/?direction=desc
• /forumname.2/?order=title
• /forumname.2/?order=title&direction=asc
• /forumname.2/?order=title&direction=desc
• /forumname.2/?order=reply_count
• /forumname.2/?order=reply_count&direction=asc
• /forumname.2/?order=reply_count&direction=desc
• etc.

where /forumname.2/ should be (imho) the only search engine entry for this specific page.

Also, I find lots of links of this type:

• /misc/language?redirect=
• /misc/style?redirect=

where the redirect target differs.

I wonder if this should better not happen and if this could be fixed by using "nofollow" tags.
Doesn't the current situation affect SEO in a bad way?

Cheers,
Martin

 

[dieketzer]

try turning on friendly urls and editing robots.txt

 

[lightbox]

friendly URLs are activated
What do you mean by "editing robots.txt"? What should I change/add there?

 

[dieketzer]

most search engines look for robots.txt in the site root.
it basically tells them what not to index.
this is my robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /community/attachments/
Disallow: /community/misc/
Disallow: /community/help/
Disallow: /community/search/
Disallow: /community/members/
Disallow: /community/register/
Disallow: /community/login/
Disallow: /community/online/
Disallow: /community/lost-password/
Disallow: /community/recent-activity/
Allow: /

 

[lightbox]

Well, I know what robots.txt does and I use it quite a bit on some of my websites. But I'm not sure how I could/should handle the pages with additional GET parameters behind URLs that shouldn't be listed in Google search results ... while the URLs without GET parameters should be listed, obviously.

 

[dieketzer]

you can control this in google webmaster tools.
site config > settings > parameter handling

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