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    4. How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?

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    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.

    How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?

    Reporting & Analytics
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    • llamb
      llamb last edited by

      Hello everyone,
      I'm wondering what's the best way to prevent/block search result pages from being indexed by Google. The way search works on my site is that search form generates URLs like:
      /index.php?blah-blah-search-results-blah

      I wanted to block everything of that sort, but how do I do it without blocking /index.php ?

      Thanks in advance and have a great day everyone!

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

        Hi Louise,

        If you can ID the parameters, you can also look at blocking these in Webmaster Tools. This page explains more. As with any blocking of URLs, of course, proceed with caution.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • evan89
          evan89 @spencerhjustice last edited by

          I agree that  can be effective. The reason I suggested the robots.txt is because Louise mentioned "blocking and preventing" as an objective. Robots.txt are particularly useful in the example where results from a search bar or something of that nature is involved. A NOINDEX, FOLLOW will not prevent bots from getting tired and dizzy, whereas the robots.txt can "block and prevent" bots from crawling certain parameters.

          With all of that said, I think it is important to understand whether you need the bots to crawl and not index (in which case Spencer's answer is correct), or if you need to prevent bots from crawling the parameters altogether.

          Hope that is more clear 🙂

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

            I'm not sure that robots.txt is effective when url parameters are involved.

            I would just add a meta robots tag to the head section of the search results template:

            evan89 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • evan89
              evan89 last edited by

              If you are able to identify a url parameter, you may excluded them using robots.txt. Here is a great resource on Robots.txt - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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