Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What should i do?
-
Hello,
We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue.
We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty .
We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages.
Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages.
All thoughts or recommendations are welcome.
Thanks
-
A couple of things come to mind:
Why don't you want the product pages to be in the index?
Why is there concern of a penalty?
As to your question:
- Are you signed into Google when you are searching? Google will show you these types of results in the SERP's, but they are not necessarily shown to customers. If you have Google desktop installed it will also show you documents on your machine in SERPs if they find them relevant to what you are looking for.
* Do the URL's have parameters? If so you can set those in GWT and inform Google what they should do when they encounter them as they crawl the site.
*Canonical the pages you don't want in the index if possible to the static pages.
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
-
How get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Google isn't seeing the content but it is still indexing the webpage
When I fetch my website page using GWT this is what I receive. HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy
X-Pantheon-Styx-Hostname: styx1560bba9.chios.panth.io
server: nginx
content-type: text/html
location: https://www.inscopix.com/
x-pantheon-endpoint: 4ac0249e-9a7a-4fd6-81fc-a7170812c4d6
Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400
Content-Length: 0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:29:38 GMT
X-Varnish: 2640682369 2640432361
Age: 326
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive What I used to get is this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.23 (Amazon)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.18
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 +0000
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
ETag: "1365696024"
Content-Language: en
Link: ; rel="canonical",; rel="shortlink"
X-Generator: Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:sioc="http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#"
xmlns:sioct="http://rdfs.org/sioc/types#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"> <title>Inscopix | In vivo rodent brain imaging</title>0 -
Why is this page not being delivered for Google search result?
Hey folks, Figured I would try to get an experts insight on this. On google search result for BLACK TITANIUM RINGS + TITANIUM-JEWELRY.COM the page that I "think" should show up is this one: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/black-titanium-rings.html However, it does not. Imho, this page is highly relevant. I used Rank Tracker here on seomoz.org and the page is not even in top 50 of search engine results for google. Our 'About Black Titanium Rings' page ranks #2 (http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/about-black-titanium.html) but the /black-titanium-rings.html page doesn't even rank. Any suggestions on what I could look at to figure out why this page is being penalized? We are not under a manual penalty (anymore!). Thanks! Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Indexation of content from internal pages (registration) by Google
Hello, we are having quite a big amount of content on internal pages which can only be accessed as a registered member. What are the different options the get this content indexed by Google? In certain cases we might be able to show a preview to visitors. In other cases this is not possible for legal reasons. Somebody told me that there is an option to send the content of pages directly to google for indexation. Unfortunately he couldn't give me more details. I only know that this possible for URLs (sitemap). Is there really a possibility to do this for the entire content of a page without giving google access to crawl this page? Thanks Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guitarslinger0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers0 -
How Many Results Does Google Show From The Same Domain?
Hi, From a few years ago I know 'double listings' were considered prime real estate. These days I can see triple listing, google places, PDFs all from the same domain. Im confused as the what the standard is now. I have been asked for some reverse SEOing to push down some bad press (keyword is the brand name) and am curious to know whether I still can get some high results by making a sub domain, optmising some more internal pages etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0