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
-
Pages automatically generated
Hello, I use the divi theme and got pages that were automatically generated with images. Is google going to penalise me because of those and consider it is thin content ? Should I remove those ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Google Search Console - Indexed Pages
I am performing a site audit and looking at the "Index Status Report" in GSC. This shows a total of 17 URLs have been indexed. However when I look at the Sitemap report in GSC it shows 9,000 pages indexed. Also, when I perform a site: search on Google I get 24,000 results. Can anyone help me to explain these anomalies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richdan0 -
The review stars for my ecommerce site in the organic search disappeared, how can I have them shown again?
We run www.prams.net, an ecommerce store for strollers and other baby products out of the Uk. We always followed schema and the stars appeared in our product snippets in the organic search, helping us a lot. A couple of weeks ago the stars stopped appearing. When I do the site:www.prams.net they appear but not in the search results anymore. We have a french site as well. www.poussette.com, their it still works. Has anybody got tips what we can do to make the stars appear again? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Leaking organic traffic - how to debug?
Hi all, We've been running an eCommerce marketplace for more than 2.5 years now. Most of our traffic and revenue have been from organic traffic, which have been growing steadily with our inventory and brand, peaking at March this year. From there, we started losing organic traffic (and revenue) each month, at a rate of about 15-20% - for no reason we can understand. In addition, some of our older pages no longer appear in search results (unless we add the name of the site to the search query). We launched a redesign on the end of May, which seemed to initially improve engagement, but didn't affect this trend of lower organic traffic. Our webmaster tools doesn't show anything special - if anything, we made an effort to clean-up every 404 that appears there and other small issues. We did make the following changes very recently, but it did not seem to have a positive effect (so far): We have deep pagination for some categories of the site, and we just added rel=prev,next in the head of every paginated series on the site. We started generating a dynamic sitemap and submitted it to google. For some reason only about a fourth of the pages on the sitemap are indexed. In addition, the "index status" as reported by webmaster tools shows some weird numbers. First, the number there is way bigger than the amount of pages we have - possibly all the combinations of our listing categories and pagination. That number was constant for a while, before taking a deep earlier this year, rising back up and declining again for the last couple of months. Screenshot of the graph What would be the first steps you'd take to understand the core of the problem? we're really at a loss here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp1 -
Sitemap contains Meta NOINDEX pages - Good or bad?
Hi, Our sitemap is created by our e-commerce software - Magento - We are probably going to make a lot of products Meta No Index for the moment, until all the content has been corrected on them - but by default, as they are enabled, they will appear in Sitemap. So, the question is: "Should pages that are Meta NOINDEX be listed in a sitemap"? Does it matter? thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
4 sites on same server with similar theme
Hi, We're building 4 e-commerce stores at the moment which are all very similar. They all sell sofas but to different markets. Product content will be different on each site so the content won't be duplicated but the overall theme of the sites will be the same, all on the same server, being launched at the same time. Should I be concerned that Google may not index all of them? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMediaLounge0 -
How do I index these parameter generated pages?
Hey guys, I've got an issue with a site I'm working on. A big chunk of the content (roughly 500 pages) is delivered using parameters on a dynamically generated page. For example: www.domain.com/specs/product?=example - where "example' is the product name Currently there is no way to get to these pages unless you enter the product name into the search box and access it from there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless we find some other way to link to these pages they're basically invisible to search engines, right? What I'm struggling with is a method to get them indexed without doing something like creating a directory map type page of all of the links on it, which I guess wouldn't be a terrible idea as long as it was done well. I've not encountered a situation like this before. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0