Indexing of Search Pages
-
I have a question on indexing search pages of an ecommerce or any website. I read Google doesn't recommend this and sites shouldn't allow indexing of their search pages.
I recently attended an SEO event (BrightonSEO) and one of the talks was on search pages and how big players like eBay, Amazon do index their search pages. In fact, it is a core part of the pages that are indexed.
eBay has to do it, as their product pages are on a time frame and Amazon only allows certain category search pages to be indexed. Reviewing my competitors, they are indexing search pages and this is why they have thousands and millions of web pages indexed.
What are your thoughts? I thought search pages were too dynamic (URL strings) and they wouldn't have a unique page title, meta description or rich content to act as a well optimised page.
Am I missing a trick here?
Cyto
-
Hmm, so what it comes down to is that, you can index search pages but provided they have a purpose or add value to the end user.
For instance, A user would search by category whereas an individual product search result isn't necessary when a product page exists.
Thanks Dirk for the links, helps a lot
Cyto
-
Fantastic as always, Dirk!
-
Hi,
If you read this article (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/) - the official guideline is "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". **(added the bold)
The question is: what is a search result page. if you're selling LCD tv's - the page which is showing only Panasonic tv's could be considered a search result from a query on the site, but it could also be considered as a page which offers value for users searching for a Panasonic LCD tv. Idem if you look for 'jobs in Montreal' - one of the first results is http://ca.indeed.com/jobs-in-Montréal,-QC - which is the same result that you would get if you would search Montreal on http://ca.indeed.com/
If these sites didn't index these "search results pages" they would almost never show up in the SERP's. I think the important part is "adding value for the users".
On dynamic search pages (or facetted navigation) Google even made best practices (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html) - even though you could consider all these kind of pages as search results.
Hope this clarifies,
Dirk
-
I can see the issue with auctionbased e-commerce sites. But a search result page could be both dynamic and static:
domain.com/results/name-of-search-string
or
domain.com/results/?q=something
I think that optimizing a search result page would be rather difficult since it depends on a unique search which is inpredictable. However, using a static URL for a result page is no good either, as it creates a ton of pages in an index with no meaning.
I wouldn't think that any common site should index their search result 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
-
People also searched for
Hi There, I am promoting an online events website and would like to know adding long tail keywords (4-6 words unique queries) under "People also searched for:" is a good or bad idea on event pages? My intention is not to stuff page with keywords, although I want to let search engine bot know that particular page is relevant for other mentioned queries as well. So Intent is to sent relevancy signal (via content). So the heading "People also searched for" could be changed to something like: Related searches Searches related to Related queries etc. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jamesinhere
James0 -
Can we ignore "broken links" without redirecting to "new pages"?
Let's say we have reaplced www.website.com/page1 with www.website.com/page2. Do we need to redirect page1 to page2 even page1 doesn't have any back-links? If it's not a replacement, can we ignore a "lost page"? Many websites loose hundreds of pages periodically. What's Google's stand on this. If a website has replaced or lost hundreds of links without reclaiming old links by redirection, will that hurts?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Lots of dublicate titles and pages on search page
I own a paiting website with a lot of searchable paintings. The "search paintings" feature creates tons of dublicate pages and titles. See here:
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
http://www.maleribasen.dk/soegmaleri.asp I guess the problem is, that the URL can actually be different and still return the same content. First time you click the "Search paintings" the URL will shown as above. But as soon as users
begin to definere they search to the left and use the "Search button" the top URL changes. So, depending on how the top URL looks different results are shown. This is pretty standard in searches. But it returns tons of dublicate pages and titles. How, do you guys cope with that? Is there a clever way to use ref="cannonical" or some other smart way to avoid this? /Kasper0 -
Page 1 all of a sudden for two clients
Hello, So, for many months, a couple of my clients have had a handful of terms that they were ranking for on Page 2. All of a sudden in the past month, both clients have moved up to Page 1, #2 for most of their terms. I have been working on some optimization tests and made minor changes, but I am concerned because the consistency of the #2 position for both clients for all of the previously Page 2 ranking keywords. I have seen this type of Google increase for clients before, and my experience has shown that it is a test from Google-so, from Google's perspective: "we're going to move your rankings up to Page 1 and see what you do with this to prove to us that your site is worth the position". Anyone had any experience with this kind of movement? Thanks so much in advance..
Algorithm Updates | | lfrazer0 -
Page details in Google Search
I noticed this morning a drop in the SERPs for a couple of my main keywords. And even though this is a little annoying the more pressing matter is that Google is not displaying the meta title I have specified for the majority of my sites pages, despite one being specified and knowing my site has them in place. Could this sudden change to not using my specified title be the cause of the drop, and why would they be being displayed by Google in the first place, when they are there to be used. The title currently being displayed inthe SERPs is not anything that has been specified in the past or from the previous latest crawl etc. Any insight would be appreciated. Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0 -
Would Google Remove Pages for Inactivity?
Hi, I've been watching the Total Indexed number for 4 domains that I work with for the last few months. In Google Webmaster Tools three of them were holding steady up until August-September, when suddenly they started declining by hundreds of thousands of URLs a week. I've asked my IT department and they say they haven't done anything technically different in the last few months that would affect indexation. I've also searched on google and on search marketing blogs to see if anyone else has experience this to no avail. As you can see in the image, the "Not Selected" pages have not increased so it appears this is not due to duplicate content (of which we have a lot). However, the "Ever Crawled" number is increasing. The only reasonable answer that I can conclude is that Google is now de-indexing inactive URLs? Anyone have a better answer? yIYDm.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | OfficeFurn0 -
Not sure whether to update existing page or create a new one
Hello guys, So far I have found this Q&A to be very helpful. I have a couple of product pages on my website which rank very low in the search results. This was because in the past they were not at all optimized in terms of title, description, etc. I would like to now optimize these pages, get some inbound links to them, etc. I'm not sure whether to do this with the existing product pages or create new ones. I'm afraid that if I optimize the current pages, the low ranking from before will carry over. Would it be better to start fresh? Thank you, Pravin
Algorithm Updates | | goforgreen0 -
What determines rankings in a site: search?
When I perform a "site:" search on my domains (without specifying a keyword) the top ranked results seem to be a mixture of sensible top-level index pages plus some very random articles. Is there any significance to what Google ranks highly in a site: search? There is some really unrepresentative content returned on page 1, including articles that get virtually no traffic. Is this seriously what Google considers our best or most typical content?
Algorithm Updates | | Dennis-529610