Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
-
Hi everyone,
I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem.
The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!!
I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too...
The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this)
Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless...
Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ?
Thanks a million
-
Yeah, normally I'd say to NOINDEX those user-generated search URLs, but since they're collecting traffic, I'd have to side with Alan - a canonical may be your best bet here. Technically, they aren't "true" duplicates, but you don't want the 1K pages in the index, you don't want to lose the traffic (which NOINDEX would do), and you don't want to kill those pages for users (which a 301 would do).
Only thing I'd add is that, if some of these pages are generating most of the traffic (e.g. 10 pages = 90% of the traffic for these internal searches), you might want to make those permanent pages, like categories in your site architecture, and then 301 the custom URLs to those permanent pages.
-
Huh not sure since I'm not a developer (and didn't work on that website dev) but I'd say all of the above^^. If useful, here are their url structure, there's two kind :
- /searchpage.htm?action=search&pagenumber=xx&query=product+otherterms
So I guess they are generated when a user makes a search
paginated (about 15 pages generally),
and I can approximately know how much they are duplicates, I can tell some are probably overlapping when there's a lot of variations for the product. There are just a few complete duplicates (when the product searched is the same with different added terms, doesn't happen a lot in this list).
- /searchpage-searchterm-addedterm-number.htm
Those I find surprising, I don't know if they are pages generated with a fixed url, or if they are rewritten (Haven't looked at the htaccess yet, but I will, god I have a headache just thinking about reading that thing lol)
There's about a thousand of them all (from GGanalytics, about half of each sort, and nearly all are indexed by Google), on a website with about 12 thou total in pages.
Maybe the traffic loss will be compensated by the removed competition between those search pages and the product pages (and the rel=canonical is surely way less brutal than a noindex for that matter), but without experience in these kind of situations it's hard to make a decision...
Really appreciate you guys taking the time to help !
-
Alan's absolutely right about how canonical works, but I just want to clarify something - what about these pages is duplicated? In other words, are these regular searches (like product searches) with duplicate URLs, are these paginated searches (with page 2, 3, etc. that appear thin), or are these user-generated searches spinning out into new search pages (not exact duplicates but overlapping)? The solutions can vary a bit with the problem, and internal search is tricky.
-
Just one more point, a canonical is just a hint to the search engines, it is not a directive, so if they think that the pages should not be merged, they will ignore them, so in that way, they may make the decision for you
-
Not a lot of real duplicates, they're more alike, and the most visited are unique, so I'll keep the most important ones and just toss a few duplicates.
Thanks a lot for your help, problem solved !
-
no not like a noindex. more like a merge.
will it make you rank for many keywords? not necessarly, as a page all about blue widgets is going to rank higher then a page has many different subjects including blue widgets.
A canonical is really for duplicate content, or very alike content.
So you have to decide what your page is, is it duplicate or alike content, or is it unique?
if the pages are unique then do nothing, let them rank. if yopu think they are alike, then use a canonical. if there are only a few, then i would not worry either way.
if you decide they are unique, they I would look at making the page title unique also, maybe even description too.
-
Thanks for your answer
Ok you're saying indeed it will act like a noindex over time.
So if one of the result page would have ranked for a particular query, it will not rank any more, like with a noindex => it will lose the 13% of traffic it generated...
Otherwise it would be too easy to make a page rank for the keywords used in a bunch of other pages that refer to it via rel=canonical... wouldn't it ?
I'm starting to think I can't do anything... Maybe just noindex a bunch of them that cause duplicates, and leave the rest in the index.
-
Rel=canonical is tge way to go, it will tell the search results that all credit for all diffrent urls go to the original search page. eventual onl;y the original search page will exist in the index.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel=canonical on Godaddy Website builder
Hey crew! First off this is a last resort asking this question here. Godaddy has not been able to help so I need my Moz Fam on this one. So common problem My crawl report is showing I have duplicate home pages www.answer2cancer.org and www.answer2cancer.org/home.html I understand this is a common issue with apache webservers which is why the wonderful rel=canonical tag was created! I don't want to go through the hassle of a 301 redirect of course for such a simple issue. Now here's the issue. Godaddy website builder does not make any sense to me. In wordpress I could just go add the tag to the head in the back end. But no such thing exist in godaddy. You have to do this weird drag and drop html block and drag it somewhere on the site and plug in the code. I think putting before the code instead of just putting it in there. So I did that but when I publish and inspect in chrome I cannot see the tag in the head! This is confusing I know. the guy at godaddy didn't stand a chance lol. Anyway much love for any replies!
Technical SEO | | Answer2cancer0 -
Invisible robots.txt?
So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp0 -
Help with Rel Canonical on Wordpress?
Crawl Diagnostics is showing a lot of Rel Canonical warnings, I've installed Wordpress SEO by Joose De Valk and Home Canonical URL plugins without success. Any ideas? I'm getting a lot of URL's that I thought I blocked from being indexed, such as author pages, category pages, etc. I'm also getting stuff like "recessionitis.com/?homeq=recent" and "recessionitis.com/page/2/", those pages are similar to my homepage. I thought those plugins were suppose to automatically clean things up.. anyone use these plugins that have any helpful hints?
Technical SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
How can I exclude display ads from robots.txt?
Google has stated that you can do this to get spiders to content only, and faster. Our IT guy is saying it's impossible.
Technical SEO | | GregBeddor
Do you know how to exlude display ads from robots.txt? Any help would be much appreciated.0 -
Blocking other engines in robots.txt
If your primary target of business is not in China is their any benefit to blocking Chinese search robots in robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Romancing0 -
Quick robots.txt check
We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neooptic0 -
Is robots.txt a must-have for 150 page well-structured site?
By looking in my logs I see dozens of 404 errors each day from different bots trying to load robots.txt. I have a small site (150 pages) with clean navigation that allows the bots to index the whole site (which they are doing). There are no secret areas I don't want the bots to find (the secret areas are behind a Login so the bots won't see them). I have used rel=nofollow for internal links that point to my Login page. Is there any reason to include a generic robots.txt file that contains "user-agent: *"? I have a minor reason: to stop getting 404 errors and clean up my error logs so I can find other issues that may exist. But I'm wondering if not having a robots.txt file is the same as some default blank file (or 1-line file giving all bots all access)?
Technical SEO | | scanlin0