How to handle (internal) search result pages?

[Qon]

Hi Mozers,

I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE.

I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked.

How would you handle this?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

If none of these pages are indexed, you can block them via robots.txt. But if someone else links to a search page from somewhere on the web, google might include the url in the index, and then it'll just be a blank entry, as they can't crawl the page and see not to index it, as it's blocked via robots.txt.

[YairSpolter]

Thanks for the quick response.

If the pages are presently not indexed, is there any advantage to follow/noindex over blocking via robots.php?

I guess my question is whether it's better or worse to have those pages spidered (by definition, any content that appears on these pages exists somewhere else on the site, since it is a search page)... what do you think?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Blocking the pages via robots.txt prevents the spiders from reaching those pages. It doesn't remove those pages from the index if they are already there, it just prevents the bots from getting to them.

If you want these pages removed from your index, and not to impact the size of your index in the search engines, ideally you remove them with the noindex tag.

[YairSpolter]

Hi Mark,

Can you explain why this is better than excluding the pages via robots.txt?

[DoRM]

How did it turn out?  And Mark have you done much with internal search?

[zigojacko]

As long as you're sure that no organic search traffic is coming in via ranked search results pages from your site, it would be of no harm just to prevent search engines from indexing those pages as per the robots.txt directive I mentioned above - then just focus all your attention on the other pages of your site.

With regards to the unique content, always try and find the time to produce unique content on the category pages, these were the ones you mentioned you wanted to rank. Normally this is feasible providing you haven't got over 1,000 categories.

Feel free to PM me over a link to your ecommerce website if you would like me to take a look at any of the situation in greater detail.

[Qon]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, there is a semi-chance of duplicate content. And to be honest, the search function is not really great.

There are no visitors coming from the search pages, since we haven't build links specifically for those pages. As for the unique content, it's hard. Since we have so many products it's not really possible. We are working on optimizing our top 100 products though.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I'd do exactly what you're saying. Make the pages no index, follow. If they're already indexed, you can remove the page search.php from the engines through webmaster tools.

Let me know how it turns out.

[zigojacko]

How I would handle this would depend upon the performance of the ecommerce website and which entrance paths via the website convert higher.

You could easily instruct search engines not to index the search results page by adding the following in your robots.txt:-

Disallow: /search.php?search=*

But is there a real likelihood of duplicate matching content with your actual category pages? It's unlikely in all honesty - but depending on your website content and product range, I suppose possible.

If many visits to your website arrive via indexed search result pages, I would be inclined to leave them indexed however and implement measures to ensure that they won't be flagged as duplicate content.

Ways to handle this depend on your ecommerce provider and it's capabilities sometimes but more often that not, is just a case of ensuring there is plenty of unique content on your category pages (as there should be) and there is no chance of other pages of your website hindering their ranking potential then.