Appropriate SEO strategies for a website's own SERPs?
-
Hello all,
What are good on-page SEO practices for the search result pages on our own sites? For instance, what page titles do you use? Do you include page numbers? Meta-descriptions? Headers? Keyword utilization?
This is a consideration for us as we link to some popular search results on our sites.
Thanks!
-
Gotcha! I say those pages should be excluded via robots.txt. Build static landing pages for any keyword term you wish to rank for and optimize those. Or rather than build a new page, take the top result of a search for keyword site:yourdomain.com, which will tell you what page already ranks highest for that target phrase, and and use that for your landing page for a term; optimize on page and build internal and external links to the page for the term.
-
Google's Webmaster Guidelines at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 states "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."
So, they frown on having search result pages in the index in the first place.
-
That's a really great point, and thanks for the "Good Answer!" I particularly appreciate the duplicate content point.
What are your thoughts on the matter if the popular searches are not created automatically (e.g., could include "kitten" and "kittens" because those are perfectly reasonable search terms) but rather created manually? They reflect broad categories to help provide search engines a way of seeing important items, along with a site map. (All this is, regretfully, in lieu of a proper browse functionality that will require a bit more work given how the data is structured). Search pages would then reflect only orthogonal terms, such as "kitten" "puppy" "guppy" etc, so they are (at least as far as I can think) unlikely to produce duplicate result pages.
That's only my uninformed, amateur strategy. What are your thoughts?
Thanks!
-
The best practice is to not let your internal search get indexed. Use no-index,follow so that Google can follow any links on the page, but doesn't place your search pages in the index.
Reason why: duplicate content
How different is a search for "kitten" going to be from the search "kittens" on your website? Probably pretty exact. However, they will possess two different url's. Ta-da! Duplicate content! Not to mention:
Kittie, Kitty, Kitties, cute kittens, funny kittens, black kittens, grey kittens, cat, cats, etc.
For proof, go check out your google analytics, how many different ways are people finding you right now?
-
I would ask the question, "What makes the most sense to the end user?" The reason I would ask this question is because I have a strong feeling that this is the same question that search engines are asking and overall trying to achieve.
I suggest following Google, Bing, and Yahoo as an example, they have the same title for each page. If I search "Christmas Decorations" in each of those engines, the title of the page is just "Christmas Decorations" no matter how deep I go. At the top of each page they let me know which page or which set of results I am looking at.
-
Thanks, M.-J.!
Yes, I am not concerned about optimizing my content pages for my search engine. Rather, I am concerned with optimizing my search engine result pages for Google/Bing/Yahoo.
For instance, suppose the page title was:
"kitten - Search Results | MyCompany.com"
What should page 2 of these results be?
"kitten - Search Results | Page 2 | MyCompany.com"
I ask because it seems that linking to popular searches on my own search engine seems like a reasonable strategy to help Google crawl a site and find content. What are the best on-page strategies?
I have consistently used page numbers on a site when I had multi-page articles and either my CMS or authors were unwilling/unable to create an appropriate page title for each subsequent page. (e.g, "My article title | MyCompany.com" and "My article title | Page 2 | MyCompany.com")
Thoughts?
-
I would not be concerned with optimizing for internal search. You want to optimize for Google, Bing and Yahoo. The Learn SEO files here on SEOMoz should give you the basics, and you might find it very helpful to use the on page analysis tool to go over the basic onsite optimization factors.
Not sure I have ever used a page number on a site, though I do see sites that use them when they have a string of say, affiliate pages ... a way to answer this question is to ask: how will it help the visitor to my site?
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
-
SEO question
why does a business rank differ on google search and google maps (for example, a hair salon we do seo for ranks 5th for "hair salon in Dublin" on Google Maps and ranks 10th on Google search)
On-Page Optimization | | ryan.mamma0 -
Website Not Indexing
My website is not indexing due to someone's complaint in Google that was registered in 2013. The complaint says I am using copyrighted images of someone else on my website but those images were immediately removed by me. I just came to know about this complaint and lodged my problem in Lumen database. Already 14 days has passed but still my page is not indexed. Can anyone please help me?
On-Page Optimization | | varun18000 -
Timeline on Moz's About Page
There has been a lot of talk about improving “About” pages on websites as of late. Moz actually has a really interesting About page, which includes a timeline. Are there any recommended WordPress plugins that can achieve a similar timeline effect?
On-Page Optimization | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
Putting content behind 'view more' buttons
Hi I can't find an upto date answer to this so was wondering what people's thoughts are. Does putting content behind 'view more' css buttons affect how Google see's and ranks the data. The content isn't put behind 'view more' to trick Google. In actual fact if you see the source of the data its all together, but its so that products appear higher up the page. Does anyone have insight into this. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Andy-Halliday0 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
Website Speed Testing Tools
I have been experimenting with a number of plugins to speed up the loading of my wordpress site and find that website speed testing tools are all over the map when it comes to results. Even the same tool can produce vastly different results. Does anyone have experience with one that is both dependable and consistent?
On-Page Optimization | | casper4340 -
Adding keywords to URL's
I understand the importance of having the keyword in the URL (at least now I do). When I created my site (www.enchantingquotes.com), I was completely ignorant about SEO. So....question is...how do I go about adding keywords to already done pages? Do I create a new section and then redirect - or do I have to basically recreate pages? Thx much 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | enchantedgirlz0 -
On Page SEO Tool
Hello - I'm looking for one tool that does the following and was wondering if anyone knew of such a tool? In a perfect world I would like to enter in one domain name and have a report generated that shows All Internal links, link titles, and anchor text All internal broken links / redirects All images, image size and image alt, if the image alt is missing. I'd love to be about to export these reports to excel and quickly run my on page optimization. The goal is to produce a checklist for a developer to execute quickly. Thanks for your help Gabe
On-Page Optimization | | Gabe0