• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?

        Technical SEO
        3
        12
        2864
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • wcbuckner
          wcbuckner last edited by

          I just got a Mozcrawl back and see lots of errors for overly dynamic urls. The site is a villa rental site that gives users the ability to search by bedroom, amenities, price, etc, so I'm wondering what the best way to keep these types of dynamically generated pages with urls like /property-search-page/?location=any&status=any&type=any&bedrooms=9&bathrooms=any&min-price=any&max-price=any from indexing.

          Any assistance will be greatly appreciated : )

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • FedeEinhorn
            FedeEinhorn @wcbuckner last edited by

            If you have a page that lists all the villas outside the search results, then you don't lose anything by blocking that folder on the robots.txt

            But still, somebody, the guy that wrote the custom theme knows how to do the changes needed.

            If you want I can help you with it, for free 🙂 Just PM me (I'll need FTP access).

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • wcbuckner
              wcbuckner @FedeEinhorn last edited by

              Having some trouble... Because the site is Wordpress, which dynamically generates pages, there is no /property-search-page/ nor is there a property-search-page.php in the editor files, so the only option I have is to put disallow: /property-search-page/ in the robots.txt file, correct?

              FedeEinhorn 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • wcbuckner
                wcbuckner @FedeEinhorn last edited by

                You guys rock! I'll try these out tomorrow. Thanks a million.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • FedeEinhorn
                  FedeEinhorn @wcbuckner last edited by

                  If you have a /all-villas/ page then you should go ahead and noindex the search results as Google Guidelines suggests. You can either do it in the /property-search-page/ or using the robots.txt file.

                  In the robots.txt, add:

                  disallow: /property-search-page/

                  The robots method guarantees that no page inside that folder is indexed or even crawled (including /property-search-page/?whatever).

                  Or on the page /property-search-page/ you can add the meta noindex as such:

                  Then check if that meta tag is shown in all search results (just check a couple of them).

                  Hope that works!

                  wcbuckner 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • NakulGoyal
                    NakulGoyal @wcbuckner last edited by

                    Yes, it will. Also looks like custom code, it depends on how the header is coded. But it should work. Test it, if you can. This should solve your problems relatively easily. If nothing works, you can always do a robots.txt deny for /property-search-page/?* pages, but that's not a recommended solution. Try the canonical way to see if it works first.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • wcbuckner
                      wcbuckner @FedeEinhorn last edited by

                      We already have Yoast installed, but the errors are still showing up in the Moz report.

                      To clarify, let's assume we have another page that lists all the villas (/all-villas/). If I go to the property-search-page php file and canonical=rel it to /all-villas/, will it canonical=rel all /property-search-page/?whatever pages to the /all-villas/ page?

                      NakulGoyal FedeEinhorn 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • FedeEinhorn
                        FedeEinhorn @wcbuckner last edited by

                        Well, that will make a little easier from one side and harder from the other.

                        You can try installing SEO by Yoast, that will put all the canonical tags for you, however, I think it won't link the search result pages to the canonical page that lists them all.

                        That might require a little coding.

                        If there's another page, outside /property-search-page/ folder that lists all villas, then you can disallow that folder in the robots.txt file, and that should fix it. If there isn't, well, then you will need to edit the /property-search-page/ page to use a static canonical tag that points to the page that lists all the villas removing any kind of filtering.

                        Hope that helps!

                        wcbuckner 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • wcbuckner
                          wcbuckner @NakulGoyal last edited by

                          Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • wcbuckner
                            wcbuckner @FedeEinhorn last edited by

                            Thanks for the response. The site is Wordpress - is there an easy way to write some sort of rule that would canonical any of these types of pages to a category page? How would you go about doing that?

                            FedeEinhorn 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • NakulGoyal
                              NakulGoyal last edited by

                              I agree with Federico one hundred percent. Figure out what your primary SEO friendly URLs are for these kinds of pages and canonical them back to that page.

                              wcbuckner 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • FedeEinhorn
                                FedeEinhorn last edited by

                                I wouldn't put a noindex meta on them, instead I would consider using a canonical tag pointing to the page that lists all the villas.

                                Anyway, what programming language are you using?

                                wcbuckner 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                • 1 / 1
                                • First post
                                  Last post

                                Browse Questions

                                Explore more categories

                                • Moz Tools

                                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                                • SEO Tactics

                                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                                • Community

                                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                                • Digital Marketing

                                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                                • Research & Trends

                                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                                • Support

                                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                                • See all categories

                                Related Questions

                                • RaquelSaiz

                                  Same URL for languages sub-directories

                                  Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages,  example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel

                                  Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz
                                  0
                                • GoMentor

                                  Best way to change URL for already ranking pages

                                  Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?

                                  Technical SEO | | GoMentor
                                  0
                                • michelledemaree

                                  Numbers in URL

                                  Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!

                                  Technical SEO | | michelledemaree
                                  2
                                • bonnierSEO

                                  Special characters in URL

                                  Will registered trademark symbol within a URL be bad? I know some special characters are unsafe (#, >, etc.) but can not find anything that mentions registered trademark. Thanks!

                                  Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO
                                  0
                                • anjonr

                                  What is the best way to find stranded pages?

                                  I have a client that has a site that has had a number of people in charge of it. All of these people have very different opinions about what should be on the site itself. When I look at their website on the server I see pages that do not have any obvious navigation to them. What is the best way to find out the internal linking structure of a site and see if these pages truly are stranded?

                                  Technical SEO | | anjonr
                                  0
                                • jkundrotas

                                  URL rewriting from subcategory to category

                                  Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.

                                  Technical SEO | | jkundrotas
                                  0
                                • JustinStupid

                                  Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase

                                  I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html

                                  Technical SEO | | JustinStupid
                                  0
                                • Donaab

                                  How best to redirect URL from expired classified ads?

                                  We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while  and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.

                                  Technical SEO | | Donaab
                                  0

                                Get started with Moz Pro!

                                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                Start my free trial
                                Products
                                • Moz Pro
                                • Moz Local
                                • Moz API
                                • Moz Data
                                • STAT
                                • Product Updates
                                Moz Solutions
                                • SMB Solutions
                                • Agency Solutions
                                • Enterprise Solutions
                                • Digital Marketers
                                Free SEO Tools
                                • Domain Authority Checker
                                • Link Explorer
                                • Keyword Explorer
                                • Competitive Research
                                • Brand Authority Checker
                                • Local Citation Checker
                                • MozBar Extension
                                • MozCast
                                Resources
                                • Blog
                                • SEO Learning Center
                                • Help Hub
                                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                • How-to Guides
                                • Moz Academy
                                • API Docs
                                About Moz
                                • About
                                • Team
                                • Careers
                                • Contact
                                Why Moz
                                • Case Studies
                                • Testimonials
                                Get Involved
                                • Become an Affiliate
                                • MozCon
                                • Webinars
                                • Practical Marketer Series
                                • MozPod
                                Connect with us

                                Contact the Help team

                                Join our newsletter
                                Moz logo
                                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                • Accessibility
                                • Terms of Use
                                • Privacy

                                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.