To index or de-index internal search results pages?

[FPD_NYC]

Hi there.

My client uses a CMS/E-Commerce platform that is automatically set up to index every single internal search results page on search engines. This was supposedly built as an "SEO Friendly" feature in the sense that it creates hundreds of new indexed pages to send to search engines that reflect various terminology used by existing visitors of the site. In many cases, these pages have proven to outperform our optimized static pages, but there are multiple issues with them:

• The CMS does not allow us to add any static content to these pages, including titles, headers, metas, or copy on the page
• The query typed in by the site visitor always becomes part of the Title tag / Meta description on Google.  If the customer's internal search query contains any less than ideal terminology that we wouldn't want other users to see, their phrasing is out there for the whole world to see, causing lots and lots of ugly terminology floating around on Google that we can't affect.

I am scared to do a blanket de-indexation of all /search/ results pages because we would lose the majority of our rankings and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the ranks of our optimized static pages. The ideal is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages - but for some reason Google keeps choosing the internal search results page as the "better" page to rank for our targeted keywords.

Can anyone advise? Has anyone been in a similar situation?

Thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

What cms are you using? I have a module that I developed that is free for Prestashop if you are using it. What it does is lets you give your search pages a static name. You have to specifically define terms, so it does not automatically make a landing page for each term. It also lets you do title's, meta descriptions, and keywords for the pages. The way the code works might prove a useful framework for adapting it to what ever platform you are using. The git is at https://github.com/Prestashop-Modules/searchterm  there is an explanation of how it works at http://blog.dh42.com/search-pages-landing-pages/

[CleverPhD]

My only point to that is that you will need a way to let people search on your site.  Since you are taking the old search URLs and redirecting them, you will not be able to use them for people to search your site moving forward.

You would have to create a new search option using a new folder/url for this so that the old one could be 301ed to the static pages.

[FPD_NYC]

Thank you so much for your helpful answer. I am truly hoping what you described is possible using this CMS, which often makes it impossible to implement complicated customizations.

I am a little confused by what you mean by "create a new /search/" section. Are you saying that all of my new static pages should also live in the /search/ folder? Then how would I de-index the existing low-value search results pages?

[CleverPhD]

You have to do this in phases.

1. Find the high ranking pages in search results - figure out why they are ranking.

2. Build the new static pages with good quality content to replace them.  Use the info from #1 to help

3. Create a new /search/ section - put that behind robots.txt etc.

4. Update navigation links, sitemaps, breadcrumbs etc to now point to the new static optimized pages.

5. 301 redirect the old /search/ section to the new static pages

6. Activate the new search section, but be careful about linking to it etc.

Done.

What is probably happening is that you have links to the site search sections from all over your site.  You are telling Google that this is the most important part of your site.  Google then says "OK" and pays attention to them.  Using the steps above you redirect Googles attention, pass along the link/rank equity and prevent the new search section from being found.

Good luck!