Site Search Results in Index -- Help
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Hi,
I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.)
Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed.
I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links.
But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be:
Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?)
Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good?
Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability.
Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
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Thanks for the response James.
The 301 redirect makes sense.
Maybe you know the answer to this question b/c I was thinking of this as a possible solution the other day. The correct URL pages have canonical tags on them, so what would happen if I were just to cut and paste the correct URLs over the incorrect URLs within the navi. page? Would that make duplicate content issues, b/c internally the correct URLs are live, but the SERP results would still be for the incorrect URLs? Is the canonical tag too weak of a signal in that case? Would the SERPs eventually drop those indexed search pages?
Thanks again for the help, as you see I am still learning this stuff, and don't want to screw up too bad
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You should 301 redirect the old URL's to the new URL's and setup a disallow for search results in your robots.txt file.
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