Search pages showing up as soft 404 in WMT
-
Hi ....we are getting allot of "site search" pages showing up in wmt as soft 404's and wanted to know what the best would be to stop this. All search pages are already noindex follow but maybe we should block them in robots txt as well.
Would the below help to solve this ?
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/Any other suggestions or direction would be appreciated to prevent these pages showing up as soft 404's
tks
-
Hi Martijn.....I have blocked in robots.txt as you have suggested and have fetched as google bot on the soft 404.s and they are blocked. Can i go ahead and mark these as fixed or are they really only fixed if these pages return 404? I am not sure how i can return 404 on them though as they are legit search result pages.
I really just want to know the best way to deal with them in wmt now that i have blocked them in robots.
thank you
-
thanks Martijn appreciate it.....any suggestion to get the "empty" search pages to 404 and not 200 if urls are entered directly?
-
Hi,
I would recommend making sure that you block these kind of pages in your robots.txt as well in order to make sure that the bots aren't wasting their crawl budget on these kind of pages. What we included for this were the lines:
Disallow: ?s=
Disallow: /search/*
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
-
Please help me figure out if my website is penalized? It is not in the search result page for the phrase that is original to it.
I just searched Google for the phrase that is original to my website (yourappliancerepairla.com😞 "LG actually has a very large and well respected home appliances business", and Google didn't bring my website at all. Does this mean that my website is penalized?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
No related searches
Does anyone have any insight as to why a site wouldn't show any results when using this google search operator:
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer8
related:site.com There are no results appearing. We recently moved from .com to .org with 301 redirects in place and change of address tool submitted. There are no penalties or warnings in search console but we have seen a significant decrease in search traffic. Thanks in advance.0 -
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi everyone! I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page. For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better? Thanks for the help. Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
WMT "Index Status" vs Google search site:mydomain.com
Hi - I'm working for a client with a manual penalty. In their WMT account they have 2 pages indexed.If I search for "site:myclientsdomain.com" I get 175 results which is about right. I'm not sure what to make of the 2 indexed pages - any thoughts would be very appreciated. google-1.png google-2.png
Technical SEO | | JohnBolyard0 -
Cached pages still showing on Google
We noticed our QA site showing up on Google so we blocked them in our robot.txt file. We still had an issue with them crawling it so we blocked the site from the public. Now Google is still showing a cached version from the first week in March. Do we just have to wait until they try to re-crawl the site to clear this out or is there a better way to try and get these pages removed from results?
Technical SEO | | aspenchicago0 -
New EMD update effected my mom's legit author page? From page 1 in SERP to nowhere for her name
I think my mom's site, MargaretTerry.com was hit by this update for her name "Margaret Terry". Went from bouncing around the first page on google.com and .ca all the time to nowhere on the index. The results are now very strange, a mix of Youtube, linked in, and small book stores that she has done events at recently to promote her first book. I was checking after some of my SEO buddys were freaking out about their EMD's getting hit on Sunday. She is an aspiring author with a book coming out this month. There is obviously no ads or spam content on the site... I have never done SEO for it either except a bit of on page I guess. It sucks that people might be grabbing her book soon and when they Google her name nothing shows up. This couldn't have really happened at a worse time. Not to mention the hours spent building the site to her liking, free of charge of course 🙂 Is there anyone I can contact there to help me out? Shouldn't and EMD that is someones name still rank when you search their name?
Technical SEO | | Operatic0 -
Linking from and to pages
My website, www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com, tells people what campingssites can be found in The Netherlands for recreational purposes. In order for a campingsite to be mentioned on our website we ask them to place a link to our website (either using a text link or image link) and then we make a page for that campsite on our website with in the end a link to ther website, e.g. http://www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com/Minicamping-In-t-Oldambt.html -> they in return link back to us. Since this comes natural will this or won't this be penalized by Google and so on for linkfarming. At this moment we have about 600 camping sites on our website alone linking to us (not all of them) and we are linking to them. Since this can be explained as link trading which is not as good for your ranking as one-way-linking what should be wise? Should i include a nofollow? I already have many links from other sites linking to mine without having to link back, is there anything else i can do with linking to ensure better ranking?
Technical SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
How does google know a search result is a search result?
In the google webmaster forums, google specifically states that you should not include search results in the google index. What is the best way to make dynamic, great content show in search results without receiving a penalty?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0