Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
-
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales).My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead.
Would you noindex this page or not?
Any thoughts?
-
One other thing to think about - do you have another method for your the bots to find/crawl your content?
We robot.txt all of our /search result pages - I agree with Everett's post they are thin content and ripe for duplication issues.
We list all content pages in sitemap.xml and have a single section to "browse content" that is paginated. We use re="next" and "prev" to help the bots walk through each page.
References
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744
Personally, I think Maile's video is really great and you get to see some of the cool artwork in her house.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
Important to note that if you do setup pagination, if you add any other filters or sort options in that pagination, no follow those links and noindex those result pages as you want to have only one route through your pagination for Goog to travel through. Also, make sure each page has a unique title and description, I just add Page N to the standard blurb for each page and that usually takes care of it.
If you close one door on your search pages, you can open another one using pagination!
Cheers!
-
Since numerous search results pages are already in the index then Yes, you want to use the NoIndex tag instead of a disallow. The NoIndex tag will slowly lead to the pages being removed from the SERPs and the cache.
-
Mike, Everett,
thanks a lot. Will go ahead and noindex.Our navigation path is easy to crawl.
So I add noindex, nofollow in meta or xrobots tag?We have thousands of site search pages already in the google index, so I understand x rotobs or meta tag are preferred to using robots.txt right?
-
This was covered by Matt Cutts in a blog post way back in 2007 but the advice is still the same as Mik has pointed out. Search results could be considered to be thin content and not particularly useful to users so you can understand why Google want to avoid seeing search results in search result pages. Certainly I block all search results in robots.txt for all out sites.
You may lose 4% of your search traffic in the short term, but in the long term it could mean that you gain far more.
-
Google Webmaster Guidelines suggests you should "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."
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
-
Site dropped in search for 95% after 18-19 feb
Hi people. I have a client which holds a escort agency website operating in Amsterdam the Netherlands. Please take note that Escort Agency is legal and holland is a liberal country with permit and all, so just trying to point out that it's a perfectly legal crafted business. To the point: we are seeing a 95% drop in traffic (basicly back to barely 10 clicks a day) after 18 to 19 feb. We've inspected the incoming links, and we did see some things going on that where not quite healthy. At first a banner was bought on a dutch advertising website. On their behalf, this sitewide banner got published with a follow on roughly 132k of pages. That was strike 1 (i think). After tossing this in disavow for temporarily basis and informed the advertisal website to put any sitewide link to nofollow in the first place, nothing changed. We found a 2nd site doing the same mistake. Frankly the banner got exposed on roughly 100k of pages on which some of 'm where barely 2 days old. Strike 2. Solved this by putting it in disavow for the time being and asking politely to put the banner again, nofollow. We cleaned out any incoming potential spammy links by using disavow. The data we obtained was a mix of google webmaster itself and moz profiling. However we're one month further now, and the graph is still a big phat flatline. What is going on? I've noted that, one other sites, which share the same brand, but completely different websites / subnets / content and all, has the same threatment going on showing a huge drop from 18th of feb 2019 and is unable to recover. We cannot see anything 'bad' actually going on @ webmasters and there is no manual action taken. So we're kind of stuck now on a site that was my project but now completely fell into oblivion and hurting someone's business. The url is https://www.qualityescort.nl/ - anyone has a reasonable advice to this issue? full.jpg full.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jvanderlinde0 -
Site Merge Strategy: Choosing Target Pages for 301 Redirects
I am going to be merging two sites. One is a niche site, and it is being merged with the main site. I am going to be doing 301 redirects to the main site. My question is, what is the best way of redirecting section/category pages in order to maximize SEO benefits. I will be redirecting product to product pages. The questions only concerns sections/categories. Option 1: Direct each section/category to the most closely matched category on the main site. For example, vintage-t-shirts would go to vintage-t-shirt on main site. Option 2: Point as many section/category pages to larger category on main site with selected filters. We have filtered navigation on our site. So if you wanted to see vintage t-shirts, you could go to the vintage t-shirt category, OR you could go to t-shirts and select "vintage" under style filter. In the example above, the vintage-t-shirt section from the niche site would point to t-shirts page with vintage filter selected (something like t-shirts/#/?_=1&filter.style=vintage). With option 2, I would be pointing more links to a main category page on the main site. I would likely have that page rank higher, because more links are pointing to it. I may have a better overall user experience, because if the customer decides to browse another style of t-shirt, they can simply unselect the filter and make other selections. Questions: Which of these options is better as far as: (1) SEO, (2) User experience If I go with option 2, the drawback is that the page titles will all be the same (i.e vintage-t-shirts pointing to the page with filter selected would have "t-shirts" as page title instead of a more targeted page with page title "vintage t-shirts." I believe a workaround would be to pull filter values from the URL and append them to the page title. That way page title for URL t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_ would be something like "vintage, t-shirts." Is this the appropriate way to deal with it? Any thoughts, suggestions, shared experiences would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
When doing a site search my homepage comes up second. Does that matter?
When I do a site: search the homepage comes up second. Does this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Forum generating automatically extra pages. Can I solve it with canonical?
Hey there Webmasters of the Universe. So i have this problem with my forum. The platform I am using it automatically creates extra pages for every page. For exampleIf my forum had one page called forum.com/examplethe same page you can find at forum.com/example?page=1If I set rel canonical into the second one pointing to the first one will that cause a problem for me?Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
Significantly reducing number of pages (and overall content) on new site - is it a bad idea?
Hi Mozzers - I am looking at new site (not launched yet) - it contains significantly fewer pages than the previous site - 35 pages rather than 107 before - content on the remaining pages is plentiful but I am worried about the sudden loss of a significant "chunk" of the website - significantly cutting the size of a website must surely increase the risks of post-migration performance problems? Further info - the site has run an SEO contract with a large SEO firm for several years. They don't appear to have done anything beyond tinkering with homepage content - all the header and description tags are the same across the current website. 90% of site traffic currently arrives on the homepage. Content quality/volume isn't bad across most of the current site. Thanks in advance for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to Build High Quality eCommerce Web Site during Low Quality Web Pages?
Today, I was reading Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites. I found one interesting statement over there. Low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings. Why should I like to discuss on this topic? Because, I have made big change on my website via narrow by search. I want to give specific result to know more about it. This is my category page: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas Left narrow by search section is creating accurate page for specific attribute products. California Umbrella:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/manufacturer-california-umbrella From above page following page is accessible. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-shape-search-octagonal/manufacturer-california-umbrella Sunbrella Patio Umbrellas:
http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-fabric-search-sunbrella Similar story for this page. Following page can accessible from above page. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-fabric-search-sunbrella/finish-search-wood My website have 100+ categories, 11,000 products. I have checked indexed pages in Google for my website. https://www.google.com/search?q=info%3Awww.vistastores.com&pws=0&gl=US#hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&gl=US&q=site:www.vistastores.com&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=910893d99351c8f7&biw=1366&bih=547 It shows me 35,000+ crawled pages which are developed by left navigation section. So, Will it consider as low quality pages? I want to improve my website performance without delete these pages.0 -
How to link back to our main site from landing pages without getting penalized
I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com). Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance). My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either. Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this? Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0