Params in URL
dr-waterstorm opened this issue · 2 comments
We've used your extension for building a more complex news filter on a customer website. Everything worked out well and the extensions is pretty good.
However the customer now ran a "SEO optimizing" tool on their website and the tool complained about "too many URLs". I just had a quick look at it and we built the filters using the Cumulative Hierarchical Filter Module (with 11 different categories). When clicking multiple of those it generates a cat1__cat2__cat3.html . So in total this probably is one of the causes that the tool complains, because this generates a lot of unique URLs.
Now my question: Is there a possibility to "switch" to a parameter approach such as news.html?filters=cat1,cat2,cat3 or something similar? Or is it just the way it currently works with the __ as separator?
Unfortunately, there is no option to change it to regular GET parameters.
However, I wonder about logic of this tool. It looks like some sort of a crawler if it detects all those URLs, but that means it could also complain about the URLs with GET parameters, so that wouldn't change much. Also, it should rather take sitemap as a reference. Besides, listing pages such as this should be probably excluded from being indexed. Also, you may consider having canonical URLs (not sure if they are already implemented) which should solve the problem, unless the tool has some strange rating criteria.
Thank you for the detailed response and the hint at the canonical URLs. I'll have a look into that topic, that should solve the issue. At least for google, I have no idea what this tool does.
Thanks again!