Why is a site search query being returned in SE results
-
Hello
One of my top targeted keywords is now linking to the results page of an internal site search query (the search query is for my site url). Oddly, this page does not contain the targeted keywords.
My site url used to be the highest ranking page for my targeted keywords.
Can anybody advise why this is happening and how I can change it?
Thanks
Nick
-
Many websites have incorporated the necessary development that allows query parameters from their internal website search to be indexed by search engines - with the view of essentially driving more traffic - however untargeted it is likely to be - it also builds many thousands more indexed pages from their domain in the search engines.
A common way of doing this is by monitoring incoming search term referral traffic and then adding a widget on page to contain these search queries linking to the same search query processed via their internal search, hence how so many of these pages can be indexed for a particular domain.
It's very common with torrent / file sharing websites.
You unfortunately can't control what methods another website is using but it sounds like there is more to it in the sense of what they have done if they are outranking for a completely unrelated term to their domain yet have identified that your domain is authoritative for this same terms.
Without knowing the specifics, it's hard to elaborate further on this... Happy to look if you wanted PM domain/keyword.
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
-
PDF in search results?
Hello community! I am not an SEO professional, though I am a practitioner, I would say. I am seeking a solution on behalf of a friend. If you search the term "Peter Blatt" you will discover a "black eye" on the first page, towards the bottom of SERPs. It's a PDF published on the Florida Department of Financial Services website regarding the final order for a settlement he and his company ("Blatt Financial Group") reached with the state as it related to professional conduct allegations. Does anyone have any advice on how to address this? I don't want "game" the search engines, but at the same time, this document looks really scary and much worse than it actually is to people, and I would love for it do drop below page one. Any advice or suggestions from the community? Thanks! Tom
Technical SEO | | 800GoldLaw0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
Duplicate Title tags vs. View All for search results
I run a directory and some search queries give almost 1000 unique results. My moz campaign tells me that I have around 1,300 duplicate title tags etc. I read online about canonical, rel=next/prev, also about having a 'view all' page just for google (page links, not search queries), but if I do this, wouldn't the slowness mean google won't index it? So the question is what is the best thing to do?
Technical SEO | | tguide0 -
Should I index my search result pages?
I have a job site and I am planning to introduce a search feature. The question I have is, is it a good idea to index search results even if the query parameters are not there? Example: A user searches for "marketing jobs in New York that pay more than 50000$". A random page will be generated like example.com/job-result/marketing-jobs-in-new-york-that-pay-more-than-50000/ For any search that gets executed, the same procedure would be followed. This would result in a large number of search result pages automatically set up for long tail keywords. Do you think this is a good idea? Or is it a bad idea based on all the recent Google algorithm updates?
Technical SEO | | jombay0 -
What can i do to move my site up the search engines
Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now. For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this. I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news. any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great. We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Disallow: /search/ in robots but soft 404s are still showing in GWT and Google search?
Hi guys, I've already added the following syntax in robots.txt to prevent search engines in crawling dynamic pages produce by my website's search feature: Disallow: /search/. But soft 404s are still showing in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I need to wait(it's been almost a week since I've added the following syntax in my robots.txt)? Thanks, JC
Technical SEO | | esiow20130 -
How to do a no follow on site search
We have a site search that is causing a huge amount of errors as the SEOmoz crawler is showing these as duplicate content. Our first thought was to do a no-follow on the site-search directory, but we realized that the site search is /site-search.aspx and URl strings appear at the end for hundreds of pages. How dow we/how can we no-follow an undetermined amount of URL strings?
Technical SEO | | Apptixweb0