Catalog filter - hide from search engines

[Doublespark]

Hi,

I am displaying a catalog filter using module content element.

To stop the extra pages being generated being indexed by the search engines I would like to hide the module or containing div from the search engines.

How would it be best to achieve this?

Thanks, Gary.

[Vera]

Isn't the robots.txt the preferred method? Additionally search engines do not like if content is different between normal visitors and themselves.

[Doublespark]

Hi Vera,

I am trying to follow the advice given here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-f ... navigation

[Vera]

I watched it and he comes in from the exact opposite angle of what you ask.

He suggests to make the layered/faceted navigation the default for EVERYONE and add filters or whatever for users that support javascript. It is a subtle difference which might make all of the difference.

The way I understand it you can use javascript to make the filter visible and it will be ok. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether or not you have to use an AJAX technique (easy to do these days) to make sure search engines do not pick up the html of the filter and use that. But thinking about AJAX; I do not think the filter will be context aware.

In any way quite tricky.

[Doublespark]

In an ideal work I would like to call a module (the filter module) using AJAX but I don't think that is possible.

[Vera]

Do you mean to include the filter html into the current page, or to load the results of the filter?

[Doublespark]

To use AJAX to include the filter in the current page.

At the moment I would use:

{{insert_module::19}}

[Vera]

The problem with the filter is that I think it uses the current page url to determine the status of the filter. I don't think you can fix that with an AJAX call. I was going to suggest to make a page layout that only produces the filter HTML. But the url will be off.

A dirty workaround:
You create a second page which has a new page layout only including the filter. To fetch the filter you call the current url, but only replace the url alias with the second pages alias. The returned HTML will have the incorrect alias in throughout the filter which you can change again using javascript before inserting into the active dom. If typolight builds the filter using templates you might also be able to change the alias used so all urls will be correct.

[Doublespark]

Thanks for the help Vera, I'll let you know how I get on.

[thyon]

You also have to disable search indexing in the catalog and then it won't index the catalog reader pages. Also, you can tag the page as a page NOT to be indexed as well.