Internal Search / Faceted Navigation
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Hi there,
I'm working on an e-learning site with the following content pages: main page, category pages, course pages, author pages, tag pages. We will also have an internal search for users to search by keyword for courses & authors & categories.
Is it still recommend to "noindex, follow" and disallow in robots.txt internal search results? Or for a site like this, is it better to use faceted navigation? It seems that faceted navigation is mostly for e-commerce sites.
What is the latest thinking on SEO best practices for internal search result pages?
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There's always the danger of being hit by Panda and other low quality penalties if you get too many of your internal search results indexed, but I've personally seen a significant boost in traffic by having my internal search pages indexable on many sites. It's also a common strategy for comparison shopping sites and other similar sites. So the answer is, it depends. If you flesh out your search pages with keyword rich content, you could see a lift in your traffic.
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