stop crawling of paginated pages Topic is solved

[DV-admin]

Hi there all,
Google is indexing my paginated pages. Is there anyway around this?
I have a urls that ends with something like ?start=10
So and an example url https://dolcevia.com/nl/italie-reizen/r ... e?start=10
These are index and I guess I should deindex them now but how to stop crawling them in the first place.
(I am using an Apache server)
Thanks for any wizz that can help me out here!
Elisabeth

[AMurray]

Strange...

Are you actually using the pagination function of Joomla? I think that's turned off either at the article or menu item configuration options.

For some reason, I can't find any joomla docs information either through docs.joomla.org search or just in Google generally.

I can't find the specific page you directly link to through your menu system.

To stop indexing by search engines...I don't know if this is relevant: https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support ... r-website/

I assume you want your home page found in Google, etc?

[sozzled]

Google is indexing my paginated pages. Is there anyway around this?

Terrific question! Let's see if we can get some good answers.

I don't understand your use of the term "paginated" pages.

Allow me to explain. If you have a category blog (or, indeed, if you have any view generated by J! that spans more than one page), the pages following the first one generated by that menu item will have ?start=n appended to the URL, when n is some number. It's conceivable that these "paginations" may be indexed by search engines.

It may be possible to use search engine tools to "disavow" links but I haven't come across any techniques built into J! that do the job for you.

[AMurray]

@sozzled, thanks for the explanation. Additionally, I realise the "no-index" and robots.txt techniques etc., may not be honoured by all or any search engines.

(actually maybe I'm crossing wires - "no-index" has to do with showing (or not) the file contents of folder(s) through a browser, not search engines...).

[sozzled]

Let's say you have a view that looks like this:

Code: Select all

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog

and you've submitted this URL to your favourite search engine. All good; that's what we want. Now, let's say, for the sake of argument that this URL creates a view that spans several pages and we start seeing URLs like

Code: Select all

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog?start=4

Code: Select all

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog?start=8

Code: Select all

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog?start=12

Perhaps we don't want our favourite search engine to index those URLs? Furthermore, if you have a website with several thousand of these things, maybe you don't want want your server tied up servicing a dozen different search engines crawling your website whenever they feel like it?

I don't have a personal preference. AFAIC, the more views from my websites that Google indexes, the better I'm doing and the more likely I will be in attracting visitors and business. If, however, I wanted to "disable" indexing of those ?start=n SERPs it would be nice to know how it's done. It's a legitimate question. I don't have an easy answer ATM.

[Per Yngve Berg]

You are under-estimating the inteligence of Google. It will provide the best experience for the visitor.

Lets say you search for a term that is present in the 7. article. Google will give you a link with start=7 that will put the article of interest at the top.

Otherwise the user will not have a good experience when taken to a page that does not contains what being searched for, but are on a later page.

[sozzled]

The issue is not about people "underestimating" what Google does nor is the question about what is a "good experience". The question is about what people can do with J! to stop search engines crawling these "paginated pages" (for want of a better way of describing things).

If people can't do anything with J! to prevent this happening then say so. If people can do something to prevent search engines crawling "paginated pages" then let's focus our attention on that, please.

[DV-admin]

I do not think there will be a solution but it would be better if the pagination goes away and is replaced by an infinite scroll feature:-)