Best way to remove low quality paginated search pages
-
I have a website that has around 90k pages indexed, but after doing the math I realized that I only have around 20-30k pages that are actually high quality, the rest are paginated pages from search results within my website. Every time someone searches a term on my site, that term would get its own page, which would include all of the relevant posts that are associated with that search term/tag. My site had around 20k different search terms, all being indexed. I have paused new search terms from being indexed, but what I want to know is if the best route would be to 404 all of the useless paginated pages from the search term pages. And if so, how many should I remove at one time? There must be 40-50k paginated pages and I am curious to know what would be the best bet from an SEO standpoint. All feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
-
According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/farmer-headers-13111.html
It sounds like I should be 404ing these pages since I never plan to re-writer them and I want them removed from my site and from the index.
According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-robotstxt-advice-12759.html
They believe you shouldn't use robots.txt..
Anyone know the best option in this situation? Should I just 404 a handful of the 40k pagination pages every week/month until they are all 404'd?
-
If this was in wordpress, there are plugins to mass fix this or you can just do it the hard way. I would just opt to remove those from being indexed but follow them. Shouldnt hurt too much and will help in the long run.
-
I agree with Fede, search results pages do not contain any value and search engine might not find it good! The better idea is to block all search result URLs from robots.txt and try to index the real pages that contain value to search engine as well as your end user!
Hope this helps!
-
What I would do, and did for my site, is to noindex (via meta tag) all those search results pages, they actually don't provide any value, you don't want them indexed, those are pages for users searching your site. If a user searches for a term that you have an article/product or whatever, they will find the article/product page more interesting than a search result page, google probably won't even show that in the SERPs...
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
-
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
Low quality links on non www version only?
Spam links showing up on non-www version only. Why is this? And is it still important to remove these links even though the preferred domain is www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LinkRightMedia0 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's? I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley2 -
Best way for Google and Bing not to crawl my /en default english pages
Hi Guys, I just transferred my old site to a new one and now have sub folder TLD's. My default pages from the front end and sitemap don't show /en after www.mysite.com. The only translation i have is in spanish where Google will crawl www.mysite.com/es (spanish). 1. On the SERPS of Google and Bing, every url that is crawled, shows the extra "/en" in my TLD. I find that very weird considering there is no physical /en in my urls. When i select the link it automatically redirects to it's default and natural page (no /en). All canonical tags do not show /en either, ONLY the SERPS. Should robots.txt be updated to "disallow /en"? 2. While i did a site transfer, we have altered some of the category url's in our domain. So we've had a lot of 301 redirects, but while searching specific keywords in the SERPS, the #1 ranked url shows up as our old url that redirects to a 404 page, and our newly created url shows up as #2 that goes to the correct page. Is there anyway to tell Google to stop showing our old url's in the SERP's? And would the "Fetch as Google" option in GWT be a great option to upload all of my url's so Google bots can crawl the right pages only? Direct Message me if you want real examples. THank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Do search results differ greatly when you search on mobile?
If you have a site with responsive design, is Google likely to look upon you more favourably and dramatically change rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
What is the best way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
I have been using SCRIBD to embed PDF documents on my site but until recently I did not include the link back to SCRIBD. Will my site get credit for this content or will it go to SCRIBD? Is there a better way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
How to enable crawling for dynamic generated search result pages?
I want to enable crawling facility for dynamic generated search result pages which are generating by Magento Solr search. You can view more about it by following URLs. http://code.google.com/p/magento-solr/ http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=bamboo+table+lamp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=ceramic+table+lamp
http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=green+patio+umbrella Right now, Google is not crawling search result page because, I have added following syntax to Robots.txt file. Disallow: /*?q= So, How do I enable crawling of search result pages with best SEO practice? If any other inputs in same direction so, it will help me more to get it done.0
