Indexing of internal search results: canonicalization or noindex?
-
Hi Mozzers,
First time poster here, enjoying the site and the tools very much.
I'm doing SEO for a fairly big ecommerce brand and an issue regarding internal search results has come up.
www.example.com/electronics/iphone/5s/ gives an overview of the the model-specific listings. For certain models there are also color listings, but these are not incorporated in the URL structure.
Here's what Rand has to say in Inbound Marketing & SEO: Insights From The Moz Blog
Search filters are used to narrow an internal search—it could be price, color, features, etc.
Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter
URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop?price=1000
The solution here is similar to the preceding one—don’t index the filters. As long as Google
has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good.I believe using a noindex tag is meant here.
Let's say you want to point users to an overview of listings for black 5s iphones. The URL is an internal search filter which looks as follows:
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5s?search=black
Which you wish to link with the anchor text "black iphone 5s".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you no-index the black 5s search filters, you lose the equity passed through the link. Whereas if you canonicalize /electronics/apple/iphone/5s you would still leverage the link juice and help you rank for "black iphone 5s". Doesn't it then make more sense to use canonicalization?
-
Hi there,
Just to round this question off, you could canonicalise the query-string URL searching for black iPhones to the iPhone 5s listings page and keep an individual phone's lising at /123456 separate, yes. It's best to keep the canonical tag for truly duplicated or near-duplicated pages, so you would not want to canonicalise an individual product page to a listings page or similar.
-
The tag is good for duplicate content but if /123456 has unique content then you probably don't need the tag on it. I would refrain from trying to implement the tag on ? on larger terms as it will give you a headache.
Some handy tips here- http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
In Short -
Set up the tag on the filters e.g a page that's the same content but its showing the colour blue then it will feed back the juice to the original but if you've got a page that's not duplicate and has content on it then you could leave it be. Google's pretty clever at working out relationships on pages and duplicate content is not the worse problem for SEO.
Hope that helps!
-
I meant to say that /123456 is an individual listing and /5gs gives an overview of all listings.
Then I could include a canonical tag at /5gs?search=black pointing to /5gs and NOT include a canonical tag at /5gs/123456 because I want the individual listing to rank?
-
Assuming the info is the same content (duplicate) just with a colour etc.
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs/123456
I would put the tag on that page pointing towards:
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs
What the tag is doing is saying the page (123456) is a duplicate of the another page, here is the other page (the link in tag) then Google will put all relevant juice to the original.
The canonical tag is great for duplicate content but it by putting it on a page deeper in the structure it only affects that page not any others. You can sometimes get a bit ahead by trying to canonical pages that don't exists like www.exsample.com?yay
-
Thanks!
I have a follow up question :).
What if there are listings with unique IDs with the following URL structure:
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs/123456
Then, canonicalizing /electronics/apple/iphone/5gs would prevent the listing from ranking.
What is best practice in these cases? Ideally I would like to pass link juice from the ?search filters to the canonical URL but leave the sub-directories as is.
-
Hi there,
Looks like you've gotten to the bottom of it there. The canonical tag is best as you wouldn't loose any link juice but it would get the desired effect of not indexing the filter.
Looks like you've got a handle on it so good luck!
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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Have a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages as a client and they are currently not getting much organic traffic to their level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: https://www.domain.com.au/category/s...-category-type These pages have been on-page optimised, category content added, yet hardly any traffic. However the site level 1, level 2 pages do quite well. So this suggests this might be an internal linking issue? The site is definitely not penalized and as enough authority for these level 3 pages to rank. Any ideas would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
Empty search results labeled as Soft 404s?
I have a site with faceted search but sometimes when someone drills down too far it ends up with no results. The page and outlined and faceted navigation are still there. The site uses dynamic URLs for the faceted navigation but Google is reporting these no results pages as Soft 404s. How should we handle these? Should we redirect these? Can we return 404 in the status code but still show the no results page they are looking for? Thanks for your responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
How would I be able to make sure Google lists search results as a combined listing opposed to a single listing/
I am slightly confused about how to let Google know to index our site as a complex listing opposed to individual page listing. Our site is well established and has over 3500 indexes. Does this have to do with the Sitemap or is it something else? Is there a way to expedite Google to list our site like the example below. Thank you for your help! Whole Foods Market
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | olive13<cite>www.wholefoodsmarket.com/</cite>Owns and operates chain of natural foods supermarkets which sell meat and poultry free of growth hormones and antibiotics, unprocessed grains and cereals, ... | ### Stores
Hours: Open 8am to 10pm Seven Days a Week. Note Holiday ... | ### Online Ordering
welcome find a store healthy eating about our products ... |
| ### CouponsHere they are: printable coupons from the latest issue of our in ... | ### Recipes
This boldly flavored casserole is an excellent way to use leftover ... |
| ### CareersHiring Process - Job Fairs and Events - Career Paths - ... | ### Lamar
Located just blocks from where Whole Foods Market began as ... |
| More results from wholefoodsmarket.com » |0 -
Hreflang and canonicalization
When using hreflang in order to deliver the relevant version in SERs, should we also make use of a reference to a canonical version to avoid duplication? Currently, we provide different regional versions of our content where the content is largely the same aside from minor changes due to spelling, units of measurement although occasionally larger amends are required. We have implemented hreflang referencing all the alternative country Urls, e.g en-us, en-gb, en-aus etc but also specificied the canonical as the en-gb version since we are a UK based website and the majority of the content originated from the UK version of our site. Recently, our rankings across all countries have been falling markedly and I'm wondering whether the canonical element may be at fault. We have not been engaging in any black hat activities that might have been responsible for any sort of fall. When we implemented the hreflang and canonical in July 2012 our traffic has actually been increasing significantly until literally 21 Nov when the search traffic is plummeting considerably across all countries. It would be useful to know if you need to specify a canonical version when using hreflang or could there be another reason for our ranking falls. Many thanks in advance of your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
De-indexing search results noindex, follow or noindex, nofollow
If search results were not originally blocked with robots.txt, and need to be de-indexed, is it better to use noindex, nofollow or noindex, follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How do you rank in the "brands for:" section in Google's search results ?
There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries. For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears. How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting0