Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
-
Hi Mozzers
I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”?
I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %).
I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because:
- Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
- Bad user experience
- The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages
- Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results
I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why?
Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them?
I’m looking forward to your answer!
Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
-
Hello,
Sorry for the late answer, I have the same problem and I think I found the solution. For me works this:
1. Add meta tag robots No Index , Follow for the internal search pages and wait for Google remove it from the index.
Be careful if you do **BOTH (**Adding meta tag robots and Disallow in Robots.txt ) Because of this:
Please note that if you do both: block the search engines in robots.txt and via the meta tags, then the robots.txt command is the primary driver, as they may not crawl the page to see the meta tags, so the URL may still appear in the search results listed URL-only. Souce: http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/
I hope this information can help you.
-
I would honestly exclude all your internal search pages from the Google index via robots.txt (noindex) exclusion. This will at least re-distribute crawl-time to other areas of your site.
Just having the noindex,follow in the meta-tag (without the robots.txt exclusion) will let GoogleBot crawl the page and then eventually remove it from the index.
I would also change your search-page canoncial to the search term (i.e. /search/iphone) and then have a noindex,follow on meta-tag.
-
It sounds like the meta noindex,follow tag is what you want.
robots.txt will block googlebot from crawling your search pages, but Google can still keep the search pages in its 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
-
What Are Internal Linking Best Practices For Blogs?
We have a blog for our e-commerce site. We are posting about 4-5 blog posts a month, most of them 1500+ words. Within the content, we have around 10-20 links pointing out to other blog posts or products/categories on our site. Except for the products/categories, the links use non-optimized generic anchor text (i.e guide, sizing tips, planning resource). Are there any issues or problems as far as SEO with this practice? Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Client has an inexplicable jump in crawled pages being reported in Google Search Console
Recently a client of mine noticed an inexplicable jump in crawled pages being reported in Google Search Console. We researched the following culprits and found nothing: Rel=canonicals are put in place No SSL/non SSL duplication We used a tool to extrapolate search query page data from Google Search Insights; nothing unusual No dynamic pages being made on the website All necessary landing pages are in the XML sitemap Could this be a glitch in GSC? We are wondering what the heck is going on. 7eaeS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigChad20 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
Google Search Results...
I'm trying to download every google search results for my company site:company.com. The limit I can get is 100. I tried using seoquake but I can only get to 100. The reason for this? I would like to see what are the pages indexed. www pages, and subdomain pages should only make up 7,000 but search results are 23,000. I would like to see what the others are in the 23,000. Any advice how to go about this? I can individually check subdomains site:www.company.com and site:static.company.com, but I don't know all the subdomains. Anyone cracked this? I tried using a scrapper tool but it was only able to retrieve 200.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Are links that are disavowed with Google Webmaster Tools removed from the Google Webmaster Profile for the domain?
Hi, Two part question - First, are links that you disavow using google webmaster tools ever removed from the webmaster tools account profile ? Second, when you upload a file to disavow links they ask if you'd like to replace the previously uploaded file. Does that mean if you don't replace the file with a new file that contains the previously uploaded urls those urls are no longer considered disavowed? So, should we download the previous disavow file first then append the new disavow urls to the file before uploading or should we just upload a new file that contains only the new disavow urls? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgs0 -
Google cached pages and search terms
Here's something I noticed. We have a rank A page and it's ranking 10 on Google search results. When I hover my mouse over our search result, Google gives us a preview, but Google also highlights in red where the search keyword is present on the page. Reviewing our page, even though we have it as the h1 header and intro paragraph, Google is highlighting it half way down the page. Any ideas why? I review rank 1 - 5 and Google highlights the keyword on the intro paragraph and h1 header Have you guys experienced anything like this? It makes me think..Google could be crawling my site and thinking I haven't got it in the h1 or intro paragraph etc.. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
To many on page links with ABC search
My client site http://www.tshirtsubway.com has a ABC quick find selector on the homepage of the site and throughout the site and as a result is is showing an error of to many links on the SEO moz error crawls reports. I wanted some advice on improving this and perhaps looking for an alternative also looking at the current setup and asking is this wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0