Redirect Search Results to Category Pages
-
I am planning redirect the search results to it's matching category page to avoid having two indexed pages of essentially the same content.
Example
http://www.example.com/search/?kw=sunglasses
wil be redirected to
http://www.example.com/category/sunglasses/Is this a good idea? What are the possible negative effect if I go this route?
Thanks.
-
I would suggest doing it. I made a module for some of my clients a while back that essentially turned search results into category pages. It worked out very well for them, one thing I did was exact matches redirected to the real categories, because the way the module was written there would be a url collision. One thing I would keep in mind is that the search results should not differ too much from what the category shows. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should have a disallow rule on your search directory and a canonical on your category pages. That should also settle any duplicate content issues as well.
-
Hi Oscar
I think this could be a very good idea. Not only does the new URL structure look more SEO friendly for bots and also more friendly for users, creating a category page can be a great way at ranking an ecommerce site.
One of the main problems with an ecommerce site is the requirement for each product page to have its own unique content on it of some substantial length, let's say 200+ words. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, this quickly becomes a problem.
Conversely, creating a category page that covers your main search terms - eg "sunglasses", "sunglasses for sale" - can also cover some long-tail keywords as well: "best sunglasses for summer", "sport sunglasses" and so on.
In order to do that you should make your category page as rich as possible - include a healthy amount of content and even things like reviews and videos of some of your top selling products. Make it informational as well as promoting your shop, so that it could also be seen as an educational resource as well as your shop front.
I think having a static category page over a search result page to promote in organic search is a very good idea. Make sure it is content rich and worthy of ranking and that any necessary redirects are taken care of.
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Targeting two search terms with same intent - one or more pages for SEO benefits?
I'd like some professional opinions on this topic. I'm looking after the SEO for my friends site, and there are two main search terms we are looking to boost in search engines. The company sells Billboard advertising space to businesses in the UK. Here are the two search terms we're looking to target: Billboard Advertising - 880 searches P/M Outdoor Advertising - 720 searches P/M It would usually make sense to make a separate page to target the keyword "billboard advertising" on its own fully optimised landing page with more information on the topic and with a targeted URL: www.website.com/billboard-advertising/ and the homepage to target "outdoor advertising" as it's an outdoor advertising agency. But there's a problem, as both search terms are highly related and have the same intent, I'm worried that if we create a separate page to target the billboard advertising, it will conflict with the homepage targeting outdoor advertising. Also, the main competitors who are currently ranked position 1-3, are ranking with their home pages and not optimised landing pages to target the exact search term "billboard advertising". Any advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
How to handle individual page redirects on Wix?
I switched from one domain to another because I wanted a domain that had our company name so it was more brand-y. However, the old domain had better DA/PA. Originally I set up a global 301 from the old to the new, but now I'm finding that I actually need to set up individual 301's from each URL of the old site, or at least from each page. However, I am using Wix so it looks like I can't always do URL-URL 301's, although I can redirect any URL to a page on the new website. The problem is that, in some cases, the content on the new site is different (or, for example, I can only link a particular blog post on the old site back to the new site's blog's main page). How closely do URLS/pages need to resemble each other for link juice to be transferred? Also, should I try to set up all these redirects manually or bite the bullet and go back to using the old domain? The problem is that I did a lot of beginner SEO junk for the new domain, like submitting to a few higher-quality directories, and getting our website on various industry resource sites, etc. I'd need to re-do this entirely if I go back to the old page. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BohmKalish1230 -
Removing Blogs and 301 redirect to blog home page?
Hi, I was at the MozCon conference in Seattle this Summer and heard great concepts about deleting a lot of pages on your site that are deemed excess. It got me thinking to remove all of our old blogs that were: Sales(ee) less than 400 words Flat out bad blogs When i begin removing these links, i know i will get a lot of 404 errors because of previous social links. So in your opinion, what would you do? Do i just 301 those blogs to my main /blog page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Best way to remove low quality paginated search pages
I have a website that has around 90k pages indexed, but after doing the math I realized that I only have around 20-30k pages that are actually high quality, the rest are paginated pages from search results within my website. Every time someone searches a term on my site, that term would get its own page, which would include all of the relevant posts that are associated with that search term/tag. My site had around 20k different search terms, all being indexed. I have paused new search terms from being indexed, but what I want to know is if the best route would be to 404 all of the useless paginated pages from the search term pages. And if so, how many should I remove at one time? There must be 40-50k paginated pages and I am curious to know what would be the best bet from an SEO standpoint. All feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Do search results differ greatly when you search on mobile?
If you have a site with responsive design, is Google likely to look upon you more favourably and dramatically change rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
What can I do to put these pages back in the top results?
Hello here, here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index. It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages! But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases? Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0
