How do Google Site Search pages rank
-
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages.
My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently?
My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
-
I agree with what David said. Also, Google says they do not want to index search results in their search results.
I'm unclear how this would be implemented, but you do also want to think of what is a useful results page for your searchers, and will a q=keyword result provide a better or worse results than /biology. I worked for a site that included (among other things) lesson plans. There was one for physics that didn't require calculus. If you did just a keyword query for calculus, you would get the result for that physics plan, as the description included the word calculus.
-
I would recommend linking to static pages, not dynamically generated pages if you can help it. From my perspective, /biology/ is going to be much better for SEO purposes than /search?q=keyword. Even the SEOmoz Crawler has a metric for overly dynamic URLs/Links and I think Google would much prefer a cleaner link.
Just my 2 cents.
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
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Google Indexing our site
We have 700 city pages on our site. We submitted to google via a https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml but they only indexed 15 so far. Yes the content is similar on all of the pages...thought on getting them to index the remaining pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search?
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search? I have seen sites that are arranged in google like : Website in Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
About us. Contact us
Services. Etc.. Kindly review screenshot. Is this can achieved by Yoast Plugin? X9vMMTw.png0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Website No Longer Ranking In Google:
My website was on first page google couple of months ago, now nothing. Shows up in Bing page one. Some queries/pages still showing OK, but some not at all. Example "residential elevators illinois" found nowhere. http://www.accesselevator.net is the website. Have found 900 poor quality links and used disavow tool. Any further suggestions? Their Page Rank also went from a 3 to a 2. Implemented nofollow on all outgoing links. Need advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trailblazerzz90 -
Why is my XML sitemap ranking on the first page of google for 100s of key words versus the actual relevant page?
I still need this question answerd and I know it's something I must have changed. But google is ranking my sitemap for 100s of key terms versus the actual page. It's great to be on the first page but not my site map...... Geeeez.....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ursalesguru0 -
My brand is not ranking on Android Google SERPs
In the new blog post here, she links to mobilemoxie, a site which allows you to do searches on various different smartphones. I tried a search for my brand, "ixl.com" on an iPhone 4 and a Android phone, the Motorola Droid X. On the iPhone, our brand appears in #1 like normal, but on the Android phone, our result doesn't appear on the first page. Any ideas as to why this would be the case? We're currently developing a mobile version of our site but we don't have one yet. Could that be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math0