Site Search Results in Index -- Help
-
Hi,
I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.)
Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed.
I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links.
But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be:
Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?)
Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good?
Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability.
Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
-
Thanks for the response James.
The 301 redirect makes sense.
Maybe you know the answer to this question b/c I was thinking of this as a possible solution the other day. The correct URL pages have canonical tags on them, so what would happen if I were just to cut and paste the correct URLs over the incorrect URLs within the navi. page? Would that make duplicate content issues, b/c internally the correct URLs are live, but the SERP results would still be for the incorrect URLs? Is the canonical tag too weak of a signal in that case? Would the SERPs eventually drop those indexed search pages?
Thanks again for the help, as you see I am still learning this stuff, and don't want to screw up too bad
-
You should 301 redirect the old URL's to the new URL's and setup a disallow for search results in your robots.txt file.
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
-
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
Suddenly keywords Disappeared from Google Search Results
Hello Guys Please help me, suddenly all of my site's keywords are disappeared from google search result, most of keywords are no.1 on google but today after 6pm i see the traffic decreasing and when i search my keywords there is no any keywords in search result. Only homepage keyword is showing. Please Help what is Happening with me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mianazeem4180 -
Dates on Google Search Results
Hello, I manage htts://globalrose.com When I search on Google for "Yellow Roses", "Yellow Roses Globalrose", or any search that might bring up one of our pages, sometimes our search results appear with dates right before the description. Does anyone know what this mean? Why they appear on some and not other pages? Here is a search result for example: Example Google Search Can someone please help clarify this for us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
Huge Google index on E-commerce site
Hi Guys, I got a question which i can't understand. I'm working on a e-commerce site which recently got a CMS update including URL updates.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn7
We did a lot of 301's on the old url's (around 3000 /4000 i guess) and submitted a new sitemap (around 12.000 urls, of which 10.500 are indexed). The strange thing is.. When i check the indexing status in webmaster tools Google tells me there are over 98.000 url's indexed.
Doing the site:domainx.com Google tells me there are 111.000 url's indexed. Another strange thing which another forum member describes here : Cache date has been reverted And next to that old url's (which have a 301 for about a month now) keep showing up in the index. Does anyone know what i could do to solve the problem?0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Pages un-indexed in my site
My current website www.energyacuity.com has had most pages indexed for more than a year. However, I tried cache a few of the pages, and it looks the only one that is now indexed by Goggle is the homepage. Any thoughts on why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernatj0 -
How do you rank in the "brands for:" section in Google's search results ?
There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries. For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears. How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting0