Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    4
    4088
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • HrThomsen
      HrThomsen last edited by

      Hi Mozzers

      I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”?

      I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %).

      I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because:

      • Google Guidelines: “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.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
      • Bad user experience
      • The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages
      • Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results

      I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why?

      Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them?

      I’m looking forward to your answer!

      Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • italominano
        italominano last edited by

        Hello,

        Sorry for the late answer, I have the same problem and I think I found the solution. For me works this:

        1. Add meta tag robots No Index , Follow for the internal search pages and wait for Google remove it from the index.

        Be careful if you do **BOTH (**Adding meta tag robots and Disallow in Robots.txt ) Because of this:

        Please note that if you do both: block the search engines in robots.txt and via the meta tags, then the robots.txt command is the primary driver, as they may not crawl the page to see the meta tags, so the URL may still appear in the search results listed URL-only. Souce: http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

        I hope this information can help you.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • MagicDude4Eva
          MagicDude4Eva last edited by

          I would honestly exclude all your internal search pages from the Google index via robots.txt (noindex) exclusion. This will at least re-distribute crawl-time to other areas of your site.

          Just having the noindex,follow in the meta-tag (without the robots.txt exclusion) will let GoogleBot crawl the page and then eventually remove it from the index.

          I would also change your search-page canoncial to the search term (i.e. /search/iphone) and then have a noindex,follow on meta-tag.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • AdamThompson
            AdamThompson last edited by

            It sounds like the meta noindex,follow tag is what you want.

            robots.txt will block googlebot from crawling your search pages, but Google can still keep the search pages in its index.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • Fubra

              Sitemaps: Best Practice

              What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
              0
            • ColesNathan

              Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages

              The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan
              0
            • Bob_van_Biezen

              Crawled page count in Search console

              Hi Guys, I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console. History: Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages. This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day. To complicate the situation: We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well. Questions: -          Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? -          Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? -          What am I missing? BxlESTT

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen
              0
            • Hall.Michael

              How to setup multiple pages in Google Search?

              How to setup multiple pages in Google Search? I have seen sites that are arranged in google like : Website in Google
                             About us.        Contact us
                             Services.         Etc.. Kindly review screenshot. Is this can achieved by Yoast Plugin? X9vMMTw.png

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
              0
            • CostumeD

              On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile

              We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD
              0
            • shannmg1

              Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice

              First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this: Galleries
               > Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
                > Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
              Blog
              Prints
              About
              Contact Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important. What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well. I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg1
              0
            • bjs2010

              Limit on Google Removal Tool?

              I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
              0
            • TauriU

              Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages

              Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.