Should I block google indexing "search.php"
-
My question is I have a search page on our website , you can search by date, number of people staying and so on, I am just wondering should block this in the robots.txt ? Because we have pretty URL'S already for searching by county and searching by towns. I cannot see any benefit of having e.g
"search/search.php?sp_dateFrom=16%2F12%2F2015&sp_dateTo=23%2F12%2F2015&sec_drop%5B%5D=727&spesh_town_id=764&q=&occupants=5&bedrooms=3&submit=SEARCH#search" indexed. Would I be correct in doing this ?
-
Second confirmation ;-), he's right. It's one of the things that for bigger sites really could get you in trouble.
-
That is the answer I was looking for, I was thinking along those lines. The problem was that Seo software was coming up with duplicate content because of different variations of the search parameters. Thanks very much for a clear and precise answer and taking time to explain this.
-
You want to block Google from any URL that produces a search result that is essentially a resorting or refiltering of a master list of search results that they have already crawled/indexed.
If you already have a set of pages that lets Google crawl all the pages in your site (could be all the products in your store, all the articles in your blog, etc), having Google crawl through variants of that same page causes a couple of problems. 1) You are wasting Google's time in spidering pages that it has already seen, vs having Google crawl your more important pages. Depending on how you have these setup, you may end up sending Google into an endless loop of non-important pages to crawl 2) You are creating pages that are generally low quality, have nothing truly original on them, they will not rank for anything anyway and may give the impression that your site consists of primarily low quality pages.
What I show Google is a single simple path to browse my content. For a blog this would be a chronological listing of articles that is paginated so that Google and the user can browse from my most recent to my oldest articles. For an ecommerce page, I might setup basic category pages, make sure the category pages have great content on them and then allow Google to crawl back through all the products based on those main category pages. If I have some products in 2 or 3 categories I do not sweat it. If on either of these examples, I show the user options to resort, filter, etc the results, I block Google with a nofollow or with robots.txt.
In your example, you already have "pretty" URLs by country and town, keep those, that will let Google and your users find your content and also provide context around that content. The crazy a$$ search URL you show is handy for your PHP code to give a search result, but would just waste Google's time. Unless you think it would be useful for a user to save the search URL results, I would see if there is a way to simply hide all the parameters from the user (submit the parameters using a POST vs a GET request for example) so that all they see in the URL result is /search/search.php
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
-
Virtual URL Google not indexing?
Dear all, We have two URLs: The main URL which is crawled both by GSC and where Moz assigns our keywords is: https://andipaeditions.com/banksy/ The second one is called a virtual url by our developpers: https://andipaeditions.com/banksy/signedandunsignedprintsforsale/ This is currently not indexed by Google. We have been linking to the second URL and I am unable to see if this is passing juice/anything on to the main one /banksy/ Is it a canonical? The /banksy/ is the one that is being picked up in serps/by Moz and worry that the two similar URLs are splitting the signal. Should I redirect from the second to the first? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | TAT1000 -
My website is not indexing the image.
Our website's images are not indexed. Will anyone help me? How will all images in my website be indexed? This is my website address: https://www.expertclipping.com/
On-Page Optimization | | jacky_risham0 -
How to block index of link and content
Hi, We have pages where articles are shown and in the sides we have small snippets of Articles which shows the title and close to 25 words and a image. When i search for something in Google the snippet image and content is shown and in Google when clicked it redirects to a page which is not meant to be shown for the keyword the visitor is querying Is there a way i can block all the links and content shown in the right and left side of the page so Google does not get confused with the page content thats not related to that page? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | AlexisWithers0 -
Google is not taking the title I set
Hi Everyone, I have the following website I am trying to SEO www.forcor.com.ar. As usual, the client decided to SEO the website after it was made by a developer that is not specialized in SEO. I am having the following issue. Google is not picking up the title I defined for the homepage. I have changed it multiple times and Google continues to take the title that was defined when the website was launched which was about 6 months ago. I also tried to verify if the title is being defined by some other website and so far I do not find any evidence that supports this. This is the title seen in the SERP (GOOGLE) as of 6 months ago - Forcor S.A: Repuestos Ford - Concesionario Oficial de Ford This is the one that is programmed via Yoast - <title>Repuestos Ford - Concesionario Oficial de Ford - Forcor S.A</title> The funny thing is that Google is picking up the correct Meta Description. Any suggestions on how to get Google to pick up the programmed title??? Another interesting fact is that Yahoo is picking up the correct title as you can see here
On-Page Optimization | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Is it impossible to get out of Panda? Matt Cutts says if you fix the problem you "pop back" but if so why are their so few examples?
In this video matt cutts says: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IzUuhTyvJk about 15 "once we re-run our data (every few weeks) if we determine your site is of higher quality you would pop back out of being affected" Panda has effected thousands of sites and a lot of smart people have been working on the problem for about 2 years since the first panda was launched, but I can only find 1 site that has "popped back" to their original rankings. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491 Apart from Motortrend.com I can't find any sites (of reasonable size) / case studies of sites that have solved the panda problem, and were definitely hit by panda. Which doesn't feel right, some people have deleted a ton of pages, redesigned their site, improved their content, etc with no success. Therefore is it a pointless exercise? Therefore, is it better to simply give up and start a new site?
On-Page Optimization | | julianhearn1 -
Navigation for search
We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | altecdesign0 -
Tags to index or to no index that is the Question
Sorry for the silly Shakespearean introduction but what are peoples opinions on leaving tag clouds to be indexed or no indexable by the search engines. I tend to leave them non indexable at the moment. I use wordpress for blogging as do most others.
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0