Does having '?search' in a URL affect the page quality?
-
In our Costume Themes category on our website, http://www.costumedirect.com.au/themes/, the links direct to search pages with URLs containing the term '?search'. For example, the 'Edward Scissorhands' link directs to http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward. Will the question mark and 'search' in our URL affect the page quality and rankings? Thank you.
-
Google recommends blocking all Internal Search Results in the Robots.txt file. I suggest creating a product collection or category for Edward Scissorhands Themed Costumes and linking to that instead. This way you can customize the content on the page just as if it was any other category page.
-
Morning Li,
Like Umar said, It's properly not to detrimental again I would say best avoided if it could be removed, words in URLs are taken into account by search engines.
If the URL is: http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward
The search engine will see something like this: costumedirect com au search search query edward
And it will try to match it with the search term used, so if you have unnecessary words the search term will become less relevant.
Sorry hope that isn't too much in-depth let me know if you need me to go into more detail or explain a little more.
All the best.
-
Hi Li,
It's a common problem in E-Commerce sites. Remember, Google crawls dynamic URLs so I wouldn't say it will deadly harm your page but yes that URL structure is not considered as SEO friendly and it carries some weigh to effect a bit.
So my recommendation is to go with SEO base friendly URLs and set a canonical tag that will tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use dynamic URLs like http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the final.
Hope this helps!
Umar
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
-
Posts and Page linking
Can I link from the post to page? I read on semoz that in order to avoid crazy linking I should not link from a post everywhere. Is it ok to link from some post which is in a category to a page?
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Minimum Page Rank to get a link
Is there a minimum Page Rank that we have to be aware of when looking to get a link from a webpage?
Link Building | | echo10 -
How to make google index the page title has changed ?
Google has indexed all my websites, but I have to change some title in the website but when checking google does not update the change.
Link Building | | tuananh0688
Please help me .
My site : http://blog.addme.vn0 -
Domain authority or page authority in ranking
Hi, sorry if this is an obvious one... I am doing some keyword research tool and have a few keywords I wish to ran for. Looking at the DA of the sites on the first page they are averaging 60ish, my site is 33. However, for the keywords I am targeting they seem to have PA of 1, or at best, 5. From what I can make it out appears they are ranking for the keywords because of their strong DA rather than any seo work. If I were to target these keywords and send backlinks to the individual pages and so build up a PA on my pages would this be enough to challenge the competitors or would I still be at a major disadvantage because of my lower DA? Hope that make sense? I know what I mean but hard to explain it Thanks
Link Building | | ccgale0 -
How to Earn Links to Boring Pages on Your Site
We do great in earning links to our homepage, articles, linkbait, and resource pages but we get few links to our product pages which are honestly pretty boring. Do you have any advice for increasing links to these important "money" pages? (we are trying to add useful content to make them less boring and unremarkable)
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
External links--Does it matter which page they go to?
I'll be doing some linkbuilding in which I will be asking manufacturers of the products we sell to link back to our site. My thought was to have a single page for our "Valued Suppliers" with a badge that I would give them the embed code for. If the URL goes to a "Valued Supplier" page on our site where there are multiple manufacturers, will this help my entire site or only the page that's being linked to? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | AC_Pro0 -
Links to commercial pages vs resources.
My company has a number of resources pages that are garnering links from external sources. It won't be long before these links outnumber the breadth and the quality of links to my homepage and commercial pages. Does having a lot more links to the resources pages risk unbalancing flow of PageRank around the site? What I want to avoid is a situation where my homepage has a lower PR than my blog/resources, or people searching for relevant terms getting directed to my blog/resources (with many high-quality links) than to my commercial pages (which will have fewer).
Link Building | | JacobFunnell0 -
Where's MY SEO DVD'S
When I first signed up about a week and a half ago I paid for the DVD's but not only did I not get a confirmation, but my 2 emails requesting a status went unanswered. A question about the page crawl gets answered right away. So is this co. all tech? Sales dept. just takes money, then hides? What's up?
Link Building | | joemas990