How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?
-
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-blahI 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!
-
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.
-
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
-
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:
-
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
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
-
404 Status Codes in Google Search Console
Hi all, I've noticed in Google Search Console under 'Crawl errors' - 1. Why does the status code '410' come up as an 'error' in the crawl report? 2. Why are some articles labelled as '404' error when they have been completely deleted and should be a '410' - there are roughly around 1000-2000 of these. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | lucwiesman0 -
Referral Data Q's
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure. I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data? My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through? 2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again? I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Submitting an 'HTTPS' sitemap.xml to Bing
I have been trying to submit my sitemap to Bing [via their webmaster tools] for well over a week and it continues to report 'pending' My site is HTTPS and the sitemap is accepted by Google. I questioned Bing about this and got this response: To set your expectations, our Sitemap fetchers use a different pipeline and because of this, we cannot crawl Sitemaps in HTTPS format. We require that you submit an HTTP version of sitemap in order for Bing to properly crawl the file. Please go ahead and delete the current Sitemap and resubmit a new one in HTTP. Currently I don't and can't have a HTTP version of my site & sitemap and my developers are telling me that 3hrs worth of dev time will go into coming up with a work-around which I'm not sure I want to invest in [I have more important things to concentrate my spend on!]. Has anyone been faced with this problem and is there any quick/cheap alternative or do I just accept that Bing won't crawl my site until they update their end?!
Reporting & Analytics | | cityxplora.com0 -
Google webmaster tools hiccup?
Our flagship website, up until March 16 was getting 1600 impressions and 300 branded clicks per day as per GWT. After 3/16, branded search fell to 300 impressions and 25 clicks per day. Our rankings haven't changed, and neither has our traffic. We would definitely notice the decline in GA and Core Metrics, and it is running about the same. according to GWT, 75% fewer people started searching for our brand on 3/16, but all of our other metrics are indicating otherwise. Has anyone seen this before? Is it a tracking issue on our side?
Reporting & Analytics | | AMHC0 -
Google Making all searches secure - "Not provided" data to increase in Analytics
A lot of you might already be aware of the recent Google change at encrypting all search activity except for clicks on ads. Rand did a whiteboard session on this recently. How is everyone planning to adjust their research data to accommodate for this change?
Reporting & Analytics | | SEO5Team0 -
Increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits in analytics
Hi, I noticed a substantial increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits data under Technology>Browser & OS in Google analytics for a few clients. Is this a bug? Are there any known fixes apart from just adding a filter to exclude the data? Regards Niladri
Reporting & Analytics | | neildomain0 -
Transferring Google analytics accounts
Hi, Does anyone know if you can transfer an Google Analytics account. We are looking to take over a new clients existing website and the analytics account is registered to their current web designers. Is it possible to transfer it to the client so that their existing web company no longer has access and they keep all their historical data, or do we have to start from scratch. Thanks Fraser
Reporting & Analytics | | fraserhannah0 -
Google: show all images indexed on a domain
Is there a way to display all images that google has indexed on a domain / subdomain? I'm basically looking for something like a site:-command for google image search.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0