Search pages showing up as soft 404 in WMT
-
Hi ....we are getting allot of "site search" pages showing up in wmt as soft 404's and wanted to know what the best would be to stop this. All search pages are already noindex follow but maybe we should block them in robots txt as well.
Would the below help to solve this ?
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/Any other suggestions or direction would be appreciated to prevent these pages showing up as soft 404's
tks
-
Hi Martijn.....I have blocked in robots.txt as you have suggested and have fetched as google bot on the soft 404.s and they are blocked. Can i go ahead and mark these as fixed or are they really only fixed if these pages return 404? I am not sure how i can return 404 on them though as they are legit search result pages.
I really just want to know the best way to deal with them in wmt now that i have blocked them in robots.
thank you
-
thanks Martijn appreciate it.....any suggestion to get the "empty" search pages to 404 and not 200 if urls are entered directly?
-
Hi,
I would recommend making sure that you block these kind of pages in your robots.txt as well in order to make sure that the bots aren't wasting their crawl budget on these kind of pages. What we included for this were the lines:
Disallow: ?s=
Disallow: /search/*
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
-
I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Hi Team, I have made my new website live. But while checking in Google it is not showing in search result ( site: www.oomfr.com ). Can anybody please advice.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Google not indexing /showing my site in search results...
Hi there, I know there are answers all over the web to this type of question (and in Webmaster tools) however, I think I have a specific problem that I can't really find an answer to online. site is: www.lizlinkleter.com Firstly, the site has been live for over 2 weeks... I have done everything from adding analytics, to submitting a sitemap, to adding to webmaster tools, to fetching each individual page as googlebot and then submitting to index via webmaster tools. I've checked my robot files and code elsewhere on the site and the site is not blocking search engines (as far as I can see) There are no security issues in webmaster tools or MOZ. Google says it has indexed 31 pages in the 'Index Status' section, but on the site dashboard it says only 2 URLS are indexed. When I do a site:www.lizlinketer.com search the only results I get are pages that are excluded in the robots file: /xmlrpc.php & /admin-ajax.php. Now, here's where I think the issue stems from - I developed the site myself for my wife and I am new to doing this, so I developed it on the live URL (I now know this was silly) - I did block the content from search engines and have the site passworded, but I think Google must have crawled the site before I did this - the issue with this was that I had pulled in the Wordpress theme's dummy content to make the site easier to build - so lots of nasty dupe content. The site took me a couple of months to construct (working on it on and off) and I eventually pushed it live and submitted to Analytics and webmaster tools (obviously it was all original content at this stage)... But this is where I made another mistake - I submitted an old site map that had quite a few old dummy content URLs in there... I corrected this almost immediately, but it probably did not look good to Google... My guess is that Google is punishing me for having the dummy content on the site when it first went live - fair enough - I was stupid - but how can I get it to index the real site?! My question is, with no tech issues to clear up (I can't resubmit site through webmaster tools) how can I get Google to take notice of the site and have it show up in search results? Your help would be massively appreciated! Regards, Fraser
Technical SEO | | valdarama0 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0 -
I have pages that are showing up as having too many links, yet they are noindexed.
I've got several pages that have "too many on page links" and the pages mentioned have already been noindexed. Do these pages need to be no followed too? Here's one of the pages: http://digisavvy.com/site-map/. There's several pages like this, most of which are category or tag archives, which I've noindexed... Do I need to nofollow these, too?
Technical SEO | | digisavvy0