ECommerce search results to noindex?
-
Hi,
To avoid duplicated content and the possibility of thousands additional pages to an ecommerce website would it be a reasonable solution to have the page as a no-index, would this benefit the site?
Thanks
**Lantec **
-
We don't use any eCommerce platform with fully developed in-house. Was more about whether it was good to no-index the search results, which you have answered. I will go about putting this in the robots.txt
-
Yes, most platforms already disallow anything from the search in the robots.txt file. You might check and see if this is done already, if not I would do it. You can also add that to the pages as well. Just be careful that it is only on the search pages.
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
-
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Search console site verification
I've been going on the assumption that when verifying a website in search console, it's always good to register and verify all variants of the site URL: http https www non-www However, if you create redirects to the preferred URL, is it really necessary to register/virfy of the other three? If so, why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Why are these pages showing up as 404 in Search Console?
This page is showing up as a 404 in Google Search console- https://www.wolfautomation.com/blog/autonics/ It shows it has been linked from these pages- https://www.wolfautomation.com/blog/raffel/ https://www.wolfautomation.com/blog/new-temperature-controllers-from-autonics/ https://www.wolfautomation.com/blog/ge-industrial/ https://www.wolfautomation.com/blog/temp-controller/ https://www.wolfautomation.com/blog/tx4s/ I never created this page, I don't want this page but it keeps showing up. The problem is the link isn't found on those pages anywhere so I can't delete it. What am I missing? How can I get rid of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Index or noindex mobile version?
We have a website called imones.lt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
and we have a mobile version for it m.imones.lt We originally put noindex for m.imones.lt. Is it a good decision or no? We believe that if google indexes both it creates double content. We definitely don't want that? But when someone through google goes to any of imones.lt webpage using smartphone they are redirected to m.imones.lt/whatever Thank you for your opinion.0 -
Noindex search pages?
Is it best to noindex search results pages, exclude them using robots.txt, or both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Mobile Version showing up on Desktop - NoIndex it?
I had a little issue earlier where I found my client's mobile version of their website showing up in the SERPs on my desktop. I asked my programmer to get rid of it. Programmer put a nofollow tag on the link to the mobile site (from the regular website). He also put a noIndex across the whole mobile version of the website. So to double check, I should probably get rid of that noindex on the mobile website right? I think the nofollow should be enough... thoughts? thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Where is the SEOmoz search operator guide?
It was available on this URL: http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professionals-guide-to-advanced-search-operators but I can't seem to find it anymore. Anyone know where it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chuck-Boom0 -
To many on page links with ABC search
My client site http://www.tshirtsubway.com has a ABC quick find selector on the homepage of the site and throughout the site and as a result is is showing an error of to many links on the SEO moz error crawls reports. I wanted some advice on improving this and perhaps looking for an alternative also looking at the current setup and asking is this wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0