Blocking Dynamic Search Result Pages From Google
-
Hi Mozzerds,
I have a quick question that probably won't have just one solution.
Most of the pages that Moz crawled for duplicate content we're dynamic search result pages on my site. Could this be a simple fix of just blocking these pages from Google altogether? Or would Moz just crawl these pages as critical crawl errors instead of content errors?
Ultimately, I contemplated whether or not I wanted to rank for these pages but I don't think it's worth it considering I have multiple product pages that rank well. I think in my case, the best is probably to leave out these search pages since they have more of a negative impact on my site resulting in more content errors than I would like. So would blocking these pages from the Search Engines and Moz be a good idea?
Maybe a second opinion would help: what do you think I should do? Is there another way to go about this and would blocking these pages do anything to reduce the number of content errors on my site?
I appreciate any feedback! Thanks!
Andrew
-
Hi,
So the main issue with dynamic search results is that they won't have unique content, and will quite often duplicate other pages, as you've discovered. E.g. Products under £10, Products under £20, and Products under £30 would all include content from the first, and then the first and second categories.
The usual answer is to just noindex all of them, particularly if individual product pages are your focus and ranking well. Unless you specifically want to rank for 'x products under £10' then there's no issue with removing them from search results.
You have a couple of options for doing this - either by noindexing any dynamic search content via robots.txt, or Noindex,Follow, which still allows crawling, but won't display the results. In general, I'd say that Noindexing the dynamic search results with a wildcard is easiest and most effective.
If you did have something you wanted to rank - then it's be a case of setting a specific search result with some unique content describing that category etc.
Dan
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
-
Pages blocked by robots
**yazılım sürecinde yapılan bir yanlışlıktı.** Sorunu hızlı bir şekilde nasıl çözebilirim? bana yardım et. ```[XTRjH](https://imgur.com/a/XTRjH)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mihoreis0 -
How-to: Geography Based Search Results for Job Board
Hi, I’m working with a client that is building a job board website. We want to have the ability to show search results in Google that show job results for a specific area. For example, “Office Administrator Jobs in Chicago” or “Marketing Assistant Positions in Cleveland”. How can we go about setting this up? Do I need to create a separate landing page for each of these exact searches? Or can this be done with a taxonomy or the job search function? This is a WordPress built website and we're using the Yoast SEO plugin. Any help would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cslingerland0 -
Ranking on google search
Hello Mozzers Moz On page grader shows A grade for the particular URL,but my page was not ranking on top 100 Google search. Any help is appreciated ,Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sobanadevi0 -
Mobile Search Results Include Pages Meant Only for Desktops/Laptops
When I put in site:www.qjamba.com on a mobile device it comes back with some of my mobile-friendly pages for that site(same url for mobile and desktop-just different formatting), and that's great. HOWEVER, it also shows a whole bunch of the pages (not identified by Google as mobile-friendly) that are fine for desktop users but are not supposed to exist for the mobile users, because they are too slow. Until a few days ago those pages were being redirected for mobile users to the home page. I since have changed that to 404 not founds. Do we know that Google keeps a mobile index separate from the desktop index? If so, I would think that 404 should work.. How can I test whether the 404 not founds will remove a url so they DON'T appear on a mobile device when I put in site:www.qjamba.com (or a user searches) but DO appear on a desktop for the same command.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Google stripping down Page Titles
When viewing pages indexed by Google, I've noticed the Page Titles have be down stripped as follows: Actual Page Title: CITY Keyword - STATE keyword
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpadaMan
Google Indexed Page Title: 1 - Domain.com None of the keywords in the actual PAGE TITLE are present; all words have been replaced with a random digit -domain.com. We launched a new version of the site several months back.. Any Idea on what can be causing this?0 -
Thousands of Web Pages Disappered from Google Index
The site is - http://shop.riversideexports.com We checked webmaster tools, nothing strange. Then we manually resubmitted using webmaster tools about a month ago. Now only seeing about 15 pages indexed. The rest of the sites on our network are heavily indexed and ranking really well. BUT the sites that are using a sub domain are not. Could this be a sub domain issue? If so, how? If not, what is causing this? Please advise. UPDATE: What we can also share is that the site was cleared twice in it's lifetime - all pages deleted and re-generated. The first two times we had full indexing - now this site hovers at 15 results in the index. We have many other sites in the network that have very similar attributes (such as redundant or empty meta) and none have behaved this way. The broader question is how to do we get the indexing back ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | suredone0 -
How to show country name in google search result
I have a site with tld .com but my target country is United kingdom so i want to show United Kingdom in SERPs.How can i show it ? I have already set target country United Kingdom in Webmaster tools but still it is not showing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000