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
-
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
What is the proper way to execute 'page to page redirection'
I need to redirection every page of my website to a new url of another site I've made. I intend to add:"Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html"I will use the 301 per page to redirect every page of my site, but I'm confused that if I add:"Redirect 301 / http://mt-example.com/" it will redirect all of my pages to the homepage and ignore the URLs i have separately mentioned for redirection.Please guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NABSID0 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Google indexing "noindex" pages
1 weeks ago my website expanded with a lot more pages. I included "noindex, follow" on a lot of these new pages, but then 4 days ago I saw the nr of pages Google indexed increased. Should I expect in 2-3 weeks these pages will be properly noindexed and it may just be a delay? It is odd to me that a few days after including "noindex" on pages, that webmaster tools shows an increase in indexing - that the pages were indexed in other words. My website is relatively new and these new pages are not pages Google frequently indexes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Need to duplicate the index for Google in a way that's correct
Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gustav-Northclick0