Should product searches (on site searches) be noindex?
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We have a large new site that is suffering from a sitewide panda like penalty. The site has 200k pages indexed by Google. Lots of category and sub category page content and about 25% of the product pages have unique content hand written (vs the other pages using copied content).
So it seems our site is labeled as thin. I'm wondering about using noindex paramaters for the internal site search. We have a canonical tag on search results pointing to domain.com/search/ (client thought that would help) but I'm wondering if we need to just no index all the product search results.
Thoughts?
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To me it sounds more like domain authority issue, lack of deep links, aged deep links. Gain them as natural as possible, over a period of time. Diversify your link profile. Your competition, those are on page 1, 2, are those in the 400 total root domains range. Again, just the root domains is not the criteria, as the age of the pages, deep links, anchor text, diversity of the links, age of those links all contribute.
You can test, but I am guessing blocking the search result URLs might not do enough. But this would be an interesting test. I would be curious to know what happens. Again, there might be algorithm updates that happen concurrently that could impact the actual test, but you could get a relative idea based on the dates when you block those pages both via a noindex and a disallow.
Let me know. Feel free to touch base via the QA or via email about this.
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The site is 9 months old, since we purchased it anyways. Someone else had a one page site on it before we bought it for several years.
However, I'm looking to do this because our rankings are pretty poor. In fact, almost every keyword is stuck on page 3 or higher even with Pagerank or 5 and 400+ root domains. I'm afraid the previous SEO company may have got the site in trouble with too much low quality links.
It's either that or the site looks to thin and is not getting past Panda, it has 200k pages in the index of which maybe 2000 have any real solid and original content.
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I know you said "new". But how new is it ? Are you also constantly working on your Link Profile ? I have seen "Monster" Authority sites within thousand's of those search pages ranking with no issues. So yes, as Tyler said, it might make sense to do a disallow via robots.txt as well as a noindex tag. Are you getting decent enough rankings on your category pages ? Again, it all boils down to the authority of the site/domain.
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Yes I disallow all internal site searches. This robots.txt breakdown for my ecom platform magento, disallows them, but allows indexation: http://www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php
Tyler
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