Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi Everyone,

I have a question regarding a problem with e-commerce URL.

When a user enters a search query on the e-commerce website a custom URL is generated, this URL is been crawled by Google and shows in Google Webmaster tool as 'URL Not Found' or 'Unreachable'.

How can we prevent this URL's generated by search to reflect in webmaster tool as 'Not Found'. I can't keep on removing it every time and forever. I want a permanent solution that can prevent these URL from Google.

Looking forward for your answers!

Having the same issue once but I guess it's up to Google because now I'm not having this problem, don't know how it stopped. Try googling about "URL Not Found Error in Webmaster" or "404 Not Found Error" see if that helps or perhaps you can disable crawling of this in robots.txt if you're really having a hard time.

Block those URL in your robots.txt file, might be it will help for you...

I haven't blocked any URL so far. The URL extension for search is this ('www.myblog.com/search?updated-max=2009-08-04T00%3A03%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=5').

Now seeing the URL extension what URL should I command to be blocked in search engine using Robots.txt?

If you redirect that particular URL to original URL then may be your problem solve out

Canonical tag is most useful tag to handle such cases.You can use this tag on those pages which do you want not to show 404.This tag will tell search engines this is not exact page and ideal page for this content is which you will show in canonical tag.

You can also use no follow,no index but canonical tag is very helpful tag in case of ecommerce websites to avoid duplicate content etc.

Option 1: You can stop crawling the required page with the help of robots.txt

Option 2: Make this query page as SEO friendly url with the help of .htaccess

Option 3: handle the redirects with 404 & 301

Hope you find these are helpful.

 I think he is right.

Use the robots.txt or .htaccess technique for that