How to NO INDEX FOLLOW layered navigation on a home or CMS page in Magento?

Question

I have got troubles with Google indexing my homepage many times in different states of sorting and ordering products that I show on my homepage. The links that appear in google for my site are like this. Approximately 90 times. Obviously, I do not want my homepage indexed 90 times.

http:/www.my-url.com/?dir=desc&limit=12&mode=list&order=name

How do I go about making sure that these duplicate content pages are gone from google? I use this code in a CMSblock to show the products:

<div class="custom-products-widget" style="padding-bottom: 0;">{{block type="catalog/product_list" name="home.catalog.product.list" alias="products_homepage" category_id="5" template="catalog/product/list.phtml" columnCount="5"}}</div>

What I have done/tried so far in this order:

• When it was already too late and google had indexed it all, I put this in my robots.txt:

  Disallow: /*?*
  

• After that: I removed all urls from google in the webmaster tools, but they came back in greater numbers.

• Yesterday, in the Google webmaster tools, I made sure that the URL parameters that cause the duplicate content are not crawled anymore. Namely:

  order
dir
limit
mode
  

• I have put the following code in my local.xml, but I found out this only goes for category pages.

  <catalog_category_layered> <reference name="head"> <action method="setRobots"><meta>NOINDEX,FOLLOW</meta></action> </reference> </catalog_category_layered> <catalog_category_layered_nochildren> <reference name="head"> <action method="setRobots"><meta>NOINDEX,FOLLOW</meta></action> </reference> </catalog_category_layered_nochildren>

My Question now is: Is there anything more I can or should do? How would I get them out of the google search results and get them de-indexed. Or would I just have to wait now?

Answer 1

I think you're looking for a canonical tag. For more information see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066

You can add a canonical tag with XML in your local.xml, for example on your homepage:

<cms_index_index>
    <reference name="head">
        <action method="addLinkRel">
            <rel>canonical</rel>
            <href>http://domain.com/</href>
        </action>
    </reference>
</cms_index_index>