Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
-
Hi
I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed.
Hoping you can help with the below:
To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages?
Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time.
Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about?
Thanks!
-
Hi effectdigital
Yep I won't be doing that! I don't think I'll be using the robots.txt file at all for this.
Thanks
Frankie
-
Just a note. If you robots.txt block Google from crawling the pages, how do you expect them to find the no-index tag? They can only find the tag if they can crawl the pages! You only apply the robots.txt block (which you should do, at the end) **after **Google have removed the offending URLs from their index
If Google are robots.txt blocked, they can't crawl the pages' coding. If they can't crawl the coding, they can't find the noindex. Simple
-
Hi Dave
I see Amazeinvent has "noindex/follow", on your search. Did you add afterwards???
Thanks
-
Hi Rajesh
**1- Add robots tag on these type pages - **
Any reason why you'd add "nofollow" on Search pages? I'd have though "follow" is a better option?
2- update robots.txt file - Disallow: /search OR /search/*
I done this before a traffic dropped a lot over the next 2-4 weeks. We regained traffic again when we removed
3- add new parameter in GSC as no URLs.
Done already, thanks
-
Are you talking about this type page - https://www.xyz.com/search/?q=jacquemus
If yes, please do like this -
1- Add robots tag on these type pages -
2- update robots.txt file - Disallow: /search OR /search/*
3- add new parameter in GSC as no URLs.
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
-
Pages canonicaled to another appearing before the canonical on google searches
Hello, When I do this google search, this page(amandine roses category) appears before the one it is canonical-ed to(this multi-product version of amandine roses). This happens often with this multi-product template, where they don't rank as well as their category version(that are canonical to the multi-product version). Can someone maybe point us in the right direction on what the issue may be? What can be improved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Password Protected Page(s) Indexed
Hi, I am wondering if my website can get a penalty if some password protected pages are showing up when I search on google: site:www.example.com/sub-group/pass-word-protected-page That shows that my password protected page was indexed either before or after adding the password protection. I've seen people suggest no indexing the page. Is that the best method to take care of this? What if we are planning on pushing the page live later on? All of these pages have no title tag, meta description, image alt text, etc. Should I add them for each page? I am wondering what is the best step, especially if we are planning on pushing the page(s) live. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Is there a difference between 'Mø' and 'Mo'?
The brand name is Mø but users are searching online for Mo. Should I changed all instances of Mø to be Mo on my clients website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben_mozbot010 -
Sitemap Indexed Pages, Google Glitch or Problem With Site?
Hello, I have a quick question about our Sitemap Web Pages Indexed status in Google Search Console. Because of the drastic drop I can't tell if this is a glitch or a serious issue. When you look at the attached image you can see that under Sitemaps Web Pages Indexed has dropped suddenly on 3/12/17 from 6029 to 540. Our Index status shows 7K+ indexed. Other than product updates/additions and homepage layout updates there have been no significant changes to this website. If it helps we are operating on the Volusion platform. Thanks for your help! -Ryan rou1zMs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrhansen0 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Can a move to a new domain (with 301's) shake off a google algorithm penalty
we have done everything under the sun using the holy grail of google guidelines to get our site back onto page 1 for our domain. we have recovered (penguin and panda) algorithm filters for keywords that were page 1 going to page 7 and now page 2. its been 2 years and we cant hit page 1 again. this is our final phase we cna think of.. do you thin kit will work if we move to a new domain. and how much traffic/rankings can we expect to lose in the short-term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
I'm afraid I may have messed up my site's organization
So I recently started working on an existing site for a company, and I'm afraid I may have done something to lose some backlinks. So to start off, say the website is www.domain.net and when I arrived domain.net and www.domain.net showed up as two separate sites so I changed my web.config file to direct all domain.net to www.domain.net The homepage was called default.asp, and I wanted the homepage to always show up as www.domain.net instead of www.domain.net/default.asp. Of course they both showed the same thing but I couldn't figure it out. So I removed www.domain.net/default.asp from indexing and changed the my internal links to the homepage to point at www.domain.net instead of simply pointing at the file default.asp. So now www.domain.net/default.asp still brings up the page, but I want it to revert to www.domain.net. I'm also a little worried because I noticed that one of my incoming links points at www.domain.net/default.asp and it doesn't get passed along to www.domain.net and I think i may have damaged my sites SEO I guess this is a very complicated and roundabout way of saying this, but how can I get www.domain.net/default.asp to take you to www.domain.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcrabill0 -
Top Google News Result = Search Result #11 (first on second page)
Hey all, I've noticed that, in most cases, when we have an article that gets the top spot in Google News results for a given keyword, the search result for that same article will appear in position #11 (the first result on the second page for standard SERP viewing). This is nearly always the case, which suggests its built into Google's algorithm to prevent overlap. Has anyone else experienced this? I haven't seen it discussed previously on Moz or other SEO forums, but it makes sense. Or if you haven't experienced this, I'd love to hear about what you're seeing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dangaul0