Help! Optimizing dynamic internal search results pages...
-
Hi guys,
Now I have always been against this, and opted to noindex internal search results pages to stop the waste of link juice, dupe content, and crawl loops... however, I'm in a discussion with somebody who feels there may be a solution, and that the pages could actually be optimized to rank (for different keywords to the landing pages of course).
Anybody come across such a thing before?
My only solution would be still to noindex and then build static pages with the most popular search results in but that won't suffice in this case.
Any recommendations would be much appreciated
Thanks,
Steve
-
Hi Steve,
Sorry for responding so late.
So whenever we have a situation as having many dynamic pages optimized, I always get back to the idea of Faceted Navigation. This way you will give the Search Engines one path to crawl to each products (but be aware that you will need to invest time and energy to have a well planned, structured navigation path).
What's the positive behind Faceted navigation:
- it will resolve the duplicate page flag on your products (giving search engines only one good specified path to crawl)
- it will raise the user experience as the visitors will have the chance to easily get to the desired product fast
The negatives:
- Are there any? - Ok, seriously speaking, you will need to sit down and think a lot of which path you choose, how to resolve it to be efficient, the web dev team will work a few days/weeks (depending on their other tasks, importance of their tasks, etc.)
What it will bring to your site (relative to what you have now): currently you have noindex on the "category" (basically a search page with a filter on it, right?) page. With faceted navigation this current structure will be completed with an "tree" structure to your final products on the specified path (that you have chosen).
I hope this is clear and helped!
Gr.
Istvan
-
Thanks Istvan,
What are the solutions you're thinking of if you were to go against best practice?
-
Hey Steve,
Yes there are possibilities for optimizing the dynamic pages, but I am on the same side with you, I would simply noindex the search result pages and focus my energy on other possibilities on the site.
Gr.,
Istvan
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
-
Does Google frown on using 3 different page titles with same content to secure the top 3 results in SERPs?
Is it frowned upon by Google to create 3 different pages with the sames content yet different titles to secure the top three results in SERPs? For example: Luxury Care Homes in Liverpool Care Homes in Liverpool Private Care Homes in Liverpool The page titles are different with slightly different meta data but the user content is exactly the same, would this be considered a cheeky win or negative to rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrustedCare.co.uk1 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Customer Experience vs Search Result Optimisation
Yes, I know customer experience is king, however, I have a dilema, my site has been live since June 2013 & we get good feedback on site design & easy to follow navigation, however, our rankings arent as good as they could be? For example, the following 2 pages share v similar URLs, but the pages do 2 different jobs & when you get to the site that is easy to see, but my largest Keyword "Over 50 Life Insurance" becomes difficult to target as google sees both pages and splits the results, so I think i must be losing ranking positions? http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning/Over-50-Life-Insurance.aspx http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning/Over-50-Life-Insurance/Compare-Over-50s-Life-Insurance.aspx The first page explains the product(s) and the 2nd is the Quote & Compare page, which generates the income. I am currently playing with meta tags, but as yet havent found the right combination! Originally the 2nd page meta tags were focussing on "compare over 50s life insurance" but google still sees "over 50 life insurance" in this phrase, so the results get split. I also had internal anchor text supporting this. What do you think is the best strategy for optimising both pages? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Whats the best way to remove search indexed pages on magento?
A new client ( aqmp.com.br/ )call me yestarday and she told me since they moved on magento they droped down more than US$ 20.000 in sales revenue ( monthly)... I´ve just checked the webmaster tool and I´ve just discovered the number of crawled pages went from 3.260 to 75.000 since magento started... magento is creating lots of pages with queries like search and filters. Example: http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?mode=grid http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?dir=desc&order=name Add a instruction on robots.txt is the best way to remove unnecessary pages of the search engine?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Block search engines from URLs created by internal search engine?
Hey guys, I've got a question for you all that I've been pondering for a few days now. I'm currently doing an SEO Technical Audit for a large scale directory. One major issue that they are having is that their internal search system (Directory Search) will create a new URL everytime a search query is entered by the user. This creates huge amounts of duplication on the website. I'm wondering if it would be best to block search engines from crawling these URLs entirely with Robots.txt? What do you guys think? Bearing in mind there are probably thousands of these pages already in the Google index? Thanks Kim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Voonie0