Should search pages be indexed?
-
Hey guys,
I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them?
Appreciate any thoughts!
-
I would definitely not allow search engines to index those type of results pages. To be fair, they're unlikely to come across them as a bot wouldn't typically fill in a search box to search, but ey might follow a link from somewhere else. For products, I would definitely want to be using category (or similar) pages to define what the search engines saw.
-
Thanks Jahir, any particular reason?
-
Thanks Alex, I mean search bars on eCommerce sites. More specifically, a search bar that filters down to products.
For help centre searches, I can understand why having the search box indexed would be useful - just don't think it would be a good idea for specific product searches. But I've never made a pro-con list so was looking more for opinions
-
I prefer not to allow search result pages to be indexed.
-
Do you mean pages you initiate the search from, or the search results page? (I know these can be the same thing in some cases)
I would allow a page that you search from to be indexed, depending upon what it is used to search. Someone who has put a query into Google might find your search page useful in resolving their query.
I wouldn't allow search results pages to be indexed, for obvious reasons, even for specific searches links from other locations. You'd be better off creating category index pages or similar.
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
-
Purpose of static index.html pages?
Hi All, I am fairly new to the technical side of SEO and was hoping y'all could help me better understand the purpose of dynamic rendering with index.html pages and any implications they might hold for SEO. I work to support an eComm site that includes a subdomain for its product pages: products.examplesite.com. I recently learned from one of our developers that there are actually two sets of product pages - a set of pages that he terms "reactive," that are present on our site, that only display content when a user clicks through to them and are not retrievable by search engines. And then a second set of static pages that were created just for search engines and end in .index.html. So, for example: https://products.examplesite.com/product-1/ AND https://products.examplesite.com/product-1/index.html I am confused as to what specifically the index.html pages are doing to support indexation, as they do not show up in Google Site searches, but the regular pages do. Is there something obvious I am missing here?
Technical SEO | | Lauren_Brick0 -
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: *
Technical SEO | | nomad-202323
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/ Any other suggestions or direction would be appreciated to prevent these pages showing up as soft 404's tks0 -
My sites "pages indexed by Google" have gone up more than qten-fold.
Prior to doing a little work cleaning up broken links and keyword stuffing Google only indexed 23/333 pages. I realize it may not be because of the work but now we have around 300/333. My question is is this a big deal? cheers,
Technical SEO | | Billboard20120 -
Can Title Tag be seen in the page source, but not seen by search engines?
This is a follow up question derived from a previous question I posted - http://moz.com/community/q/does-title-tag-location-in-a-page-s-source-code-matter There have been several reputable crawl tools used on our (including Moz) site that state we are missing title tags on may pages. One such page is http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx I can see the title tag on line 238 of the page source. I find it unlikely that there is an issue with the crawl tools. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Nick
Technical SEO | | Istoresinc0 -
Skip indexing the search pages
Hi, I want all such search pages skipped from indexing www.somesite.com/search/node/ So i have this in robots.txt (Disallow: /search/) Now any posts that start with search are being blocked and in Google i see this message A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. How can i handle this and also how can i find all URL's that Google is blocking from showing Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Differing numbers of pages indexed with and without the trailing slash
I noticed today that a site: query in Google (UK) for a certain domain I'm looking at returns different numbers depending on whether or not the trailing slash is added at the end. With the trailing slash the numbers are significantly different. This is a domain with a few duplicate content issues. It seems very rare but I've managed to replicate it for a couple of other well known domains, so this is the phenomenon I'm referring to: site:travelsupermarket.com - 16'300 results
Technical SEO | | ianmcintosh
site:travelsupermarket.com/ - 45'500 results site:guardian.co.uk - 120'000'000 results
site:guardian.co.uk/ - 121'000'000 results For the particular domain I'm looking at the numbers are 19'000 without the trailing slash and 800'000 with it! As mentioned, there are a few duplicate content issues at the moment that I'm trying to tidy up, but how should I interpret this? Has anyone seen this before and can advise what it could indicate? Thanks in advance for any answers.0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710 -
What is the best method for indexing blog pages?
I have a client whose blog has hundreds if not thousands of entries. My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? Can we do this dynamically? And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | coxen000