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
-
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages
Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now. Thank you,
Regards,
Armands0 -
HTML snapshot creating soft 404
Has anyone any experience with HTML snapshots? We have a recruitment client that has HTML snapshots against all job pages as they are built with AJAX. The pages naturally die after around four weeks (the job vacancy runs out) and whilst the AJAX version of the page hard 404s, the HTML snapshot version returns a soft 404. How can we get it to mirror the dead page with 404 status?
Technical SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
Keyword not showing
Hi, we are trying to rank this keyword "Human Resource Books" for Silvercreek.ca for a long time. But somehow, the keyword is not ranked by google at all. Is there a reason why Google is denying our site? What did we do wrong? Can anyone help to see what wrong with tis siet www.silvercreekpress.ca? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Locating 404 Page Errors for Deletion
On my SEOmoz report, there are several 404 pages that I assume need deletion. Yes? When I am looking at my pages from the back-end of WordPress, how do I identify these to delete or fix them? In the list of pages I have created, it is not at all apparent when I click into "edit" the page that any of these are broken pages. I think the 404 pages are urls from pages that I changed the url to be more seo friendly, but they don't really exist. I hope this makes sense - it is baffling to me : ) Thank you for any insight and help with getting these cleared. The errors are listed below from the report. Sheryl | 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/durango-dentists-why-greg-mann/dentists-in-durango-co/Cosmetic_Dentistry_Services_Teeth_Whitening_Montezuma_CO.html 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/durango-dentists-why-greg-mann/dentists-in-durango-co/General_Dentistry_Services_White_Fillings_Montezuma_CO.html 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/durango-dentists-why-greg-mann/dentists-in-durango-co/Request_an_Appointment.html 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/videos/repairing-teeth/pid%3A4078865 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/videos/teeth-whitening/pid%3A4078865 404 1 0 404 : Error http://durangocodentists.com/videos/veneers/pid%3A4078865 | 404 | 1 | 0 |
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850 -
How to handle .mobi and normal website for mobile search and regular search
Hi, we have our regular website at jameda.de and a mobile only page at jameda.mobi Users on mobile devices will be automatically redirected to .mobi if they click on a link to jameda.de in the SERPs. What is the best practice to ensure, that Googlebot is indexing jameda.de and Googlebot Mobile is indexing jameda.mobi without duplicate content issues and having Link-Juice benefits on mobile search at the same time? Thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | jameda0