Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
-
Hi all
Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue.
I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too.
Thanks!
-
I also want to know how to increase the Authority of my website. I have taken the Moz course to learn the SEO to give their services. Can you guide more?
-
Hi Guillaume_L
I'd presume your idea is fine, looks like a good idea! As long as you keep the number of URL parameters to one or two like outlined in the article you shared, or you'll end up with millions/billions of URL's. It'll also help keep your Page Titles/Descriptions shorter if you only have 1 or 2 parameters set up. I'd suggest noindexing any pages that have more than 2 parameters chosen.
Seems like you'll be doing something similar to what AirBNB are doing, so I think you should be good to go!
-
I actually found this link interesting: https://thecontentworks.uk/dynamic-pages-seo-friendly/.
It seems to me like generating dynamic content delivers a better user experience, and creates less risk of duplicate content/errors. It would be odd if Google penalized me for this.
-
Hi Guys,
I fell on this topic while searching a SEO friendly solution to a site I am currently building and would love to have your insights on this as it is directly related to having internal search results indexed on Google.
I am currently building an industry-specific small business directory (ex: Plumber) in Wordpress. The way I initially set it up is that when the user gets on the home page (ex: Find Plumbers in your area), they select the location they are interested in from a dropdown (ex: Miami) and the site returns a list of Plumbers that serve this location. I set up the results page as being an Archive that displays results linked to the search query, in this case, a location. The URLs of the search results look like www.company.com/plumber/?_location=Miami.
This said, I am not expecting people to find my home page on Google, but rather a specific location, which is an internal search result.
While everyone seems to agree that internal search results are not supposed to be indexed, my alternative would be to build a page for every location, which would create hundreds of new pages with duplicate content (I have a FAQ about how to select the best plumber on the same page below the results).
I also looked around and Yelp has a similar approach for the location results (ex: https://www.yelp.ca/search?cflt=plumbing&find_loc=Toronto%2C+ON)
Any thoughts on this use case?
Thanks
-
That's a great question. If you have pages that are generating revenue and ranking really well. I'd be hesitant to remove them from the index. Like the article mentions, Wayfair generates a huge amount of search traffic through these auto-generated internal search pages. If these are considered high quality and ranking well in Google, I would probably recommend leaving them alone.
If you want to trim some of these down, I'd use Google Analytics to find ones that aren't generating organic traffic/revenue. You could consider adding the "noindex" tag to those.
In general it is best practice to remove internal search pages from Google as they can contribute to a large amount of index bloat. However, I wouldn't reduce any that you see are performing well.
I'd be happy to take a look if you have any other questions!
-
I don't think that you should be looking at those from a SEO perspective. Why? If some people landed there through the search engines, this means that they have found the result in the SERP useful. This is much more important that the SEO. There are many who work for SEO, but do not manage to attract interest from those who search Google or other SE. So, keep and develop you internal search 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
-
See Different Landing page for my main keyword in google search result
I have a website like http://www.bannerbuzz.com, i am promoting home page with vinyl banners keyword, but currently i can see my website's review page for vinyl banners result in google, i want to display my home page instead of review page for my keyword result in google, its frequently change, some time i can see home page for it and some time it shows review page as i attached image. i want to show my home page, so can you please help me to solve it, how can i stable my home page with main keywords. OtOXxiE.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Should component pages be visible in the search result?
Hi everyone, My question is suppose i have a blog having 200 pages arranged in footer like seomoz blog and when i move to 2nd page and say the url is http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 and when i search exact url on google should this page be visible in search result or not. Since all component pages of seomoz blog are visible, i think this should not be a problem but when i see other popular blogs like SEJ and seroundtable none of their component pages are visible in search result. By the way i am using rel=prev and next but not robots: noindex, follow
Technical SEO | | himanshu3019890 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Does the use of sliders for text-on-page, effects SEO in any way?
The concept of using text sliders in an e-commerce site as a solution to placing SEO text above or in between product and high on ages, seems too good to be true.... or is it? How would a text slider for FAQ or other on-page text done with sliding paragraphs (similar but not this specific code- http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/08/dynamic-faq-jquery-yql-google-docs/faq.html) might effect text-on-page SEO. Does Google consider it hidden text? Would there be any other concerns or best practices with this design concept? faq.html
Technical SEO | | RKanfi0 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0