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
-
Google Search Analytics How to Get Search Keywords for a Page?
How do I get the keywords coming into a page on the new Google Webmaster Tools Search Analytics? Used to be there in the old version. You would just view your most popular urls and when you expanded the urls you would see the terms driving the traffic. How do I see the most popular keyword queries for a given page in the new tool? Alternatively can I still use the old tool somehow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Best Way to Incorporate FAQs into Every Page - Duplicate Content?
Hi Mozzers, We want to incorporate a 'Dictionary' of terms onto quite a few pages on our site, similar to an FAQ system. The 'Dictionary' has 285 terms in it, with about 1 sentence of content for each one (approximately 5,000 words total). The content is unique to our site and not keyword stuffed, but I am unsure what Google will think about us having all this shared content on these pages. I have a few ideas about how we can build this, but my higher-ups really want the entire dictionary on every page. Thoughts? Image of what we're thinking here - http://screencast.com/t/GkhOktwC4I Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Does Google throttle back the search performance of a penalised website/page after the penalty has been removed?
Hi Mozzers. Back in 2013 my website www.octopus-hr.co.uk was hit by a Penguin 2.0 penalty owing to a harmful backlink profile built by a dodgy SEO consultant (now fired). The penalty seemed to apply to the homepage of the site but other pages were unaffected. We got what links we could removed, disavowed the rest and were informed in September 2013 that the penalty had been removed and our re-inclusion request had been successful. However our website homepage still ranks poorly for the search terms we're targeting in the UK: "HR Software" "HR Systems" On page factors are in my opinion pretty well optimised for these search terms. In terms of link building post penalty we've focused on high authority and relevant sites. I believe that compared to most of our search competitors the back link profile to our homepage is in pretty good shape, however it still ranks badly. Has anyone had any experience of a penalty hangover from Google in the past? Are there other things I should consider? Thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OctopusHR0 -
Best way of connecting with key influencers
Hi, I've identified a list of key influencers within my niche. I now want to connect with them, specifically to ask them to provide regular content for our site (they'll hopefully promote it via their own channels as well as us doing some promotion). The reason I want to do this is because it's easier to move Mohammed than the mountain! - I want to piggy-back on their success! How would you go about doing this? Some of the influencers are follwing us on Twitter and I've had some nice discussions with them over the last few months or so (our Twitter has only been going since about March this year). Would you reach out via Twitter, or call them up? I really don't want to mess this up! Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT1 -
How to Build High Quality eCommerce Web Site during Low Quality Web Pages?
Today, I was reading Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites. I found one interesting statement over there. Low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings. Why should I like to discuss on this topic? Because, I have made big change on my website via narrow by search. I want to give specific result to know more about it. This is my category page: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas Left narrow by search section is creating accurate page for specific attribute products. California Umbrella:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/manufacturer-california-umbrella From above page following page is accessible. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-shape-search-octagonal/manufacturer-california-umbrella Sunbrella Patio Umbrellas:
http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-fabric-search-sunbrella Similar story for this page. Following page can accessible from above page. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-fabric-search-sunbrella/finish-search-wood My website have 100+ categories, 11,000 products. I have checked indexed pages in Google for my website. https://www.google.com/search?q=info%3Awww.vistastores.com&pws=0&gl=US#hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&gl=US&q=site:www.vistastores.com&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=910893d99351c8f7&biw=1366&bih=547 It shows me 35,000+ crawled pages which are developed by left navigation section. So, Will it consider as low quality pages? I want to improve my website performance without delete these pages.0 -
To index or not to index search pages - (Panda related)
Hi Mozzers I have a WordPress site with Relevanssi the search engine plugin, free version. Questions: Should I let Google index my site's SERPS? I am scared the page quality is to thin, and then Panda bear will get angry. This plugin (or my previous search engine plugin) created many of these "no-results" uris: /?s=no-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Ano-results%3Akids+wall&cat=no-results&pg=6 I have added a robots.txt rule to disallow these pages and did a GWT URL removal request. But links to these pages are still being displayed in Google's SERPS under "repeat the search with the omitted results included" results. So will this affect me negatively or are these results harmless? What exactly is an omitted result? As I understand it is that Google found a link to a page they but can't display it because I block GoogleBot. Thanx in advance guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClassifiedsKing0 -
Best way to improve page rank
I notice many small business sites seems to have a page rank of 3,4, or 5 which don't appear to be doing a great deal of SEO on their websites. i.e these are very basic sites with a little static content that rarely changes, no blogs or particular links. Does having a high page rank still mean your will achieve better search engine positions? whats the best way to improve page rank for small business sites? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites
Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands. Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor. It has 1 brand (also sold on site A). Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites. We are looking at options. Option 1: Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great. We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0