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Receiving a message in Google Webmaster Tools that reads "Googlebot found an extremely high number" is not uncommon for large sites. We covered it many times, including back in 2008 but the big question is how do you avoid it?
It is not a simple answer. Often there is not much one can do outside of trying to restructure their navigation and site architecture. But John Mueller from Google did post some advice in a Google Webmaster Help thread this morning. He suggested using the nofollow attribute on some links for this specific example. Let me quote JohnMu:
One way to prevent these from being discovered could be to use rel=nofollow on the links to those pages, assuming you haven't done so already. Also, in particular for the /goto/ URLs, you could also consider tracking those links separately (using JavaScript) instead of redirecting them through that page.
Do you consider this message in Google to be serious and take action to minimize the message or do you ignore it?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Ajay Kudva
11/23/2010 01:59 pm
Another solution to this can be using the Canonical Tag (rel=canonical). This is the best solution in case of duplicate content on dynamic pages. The Canonical Tag can be used on these dynamic pages and will point to a corresponding static version these pages. For example, we can place a Canonical Tag on www.example.com/search.php?pid=charger to either www.example.com/charger.php or www.example.com/search.php
Barry
11/23/2010 03:05 pm
I'm forced to ignore it. Can't do anything useful with it. So far have checked each of these messages we get and in every single case all the 'example' urls are either explicitly blocked with robots.txt or explicitly listed in a (geniune and correct) sitemap. We do use nofollow on a number of places (calanders etc) and try to exclude them with parameter handling. It would be so much more useful if the warning included better examples - it might be we do have a new unnoticed part of the site getting crawled like crazy - but unable to find it :( Nothing unexpected in the 'crawl errors' section of WMT either.
franz
12/01/2010 02:51 pm
in general i see it as a postive sign :)