Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
-
Hi all
Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue.
I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too.
Thanks!
-
I also want to know how to increase the Authority of my website. I have taken the Moz course to learn the SEO to give their services. Can you guide more?
-
Hi Guillaume_L
I'd presume your idea is fine, looks like a good idea! As long as you keep the number of URL parameters to one or two like outlined in the article you shared, or you'll end up with millions/billions of URL's. It'll also help keep your Page Titles/Descriptions shorter if you only have 1 or 2 parameters set up. I'd suggest noindexing any pages that have more than 2 parameters chosen.
Seems like you'll be doing something similar to what AirBNB are doing, so I think you should be good to go!
-
I actually found this link interesting: https://thecontentworks.uk/dynamic-pages-seo-friendly/.
It seems to me like generating dynamic content delivers a better user experience, and creates less risk of duplicate content/errors. It would be odd if Google penalized me for this.
-
Hi Guys,
I fell on this topic while searching a SEO friendly solution to a site I am currently building and would love to have your insights on this as it is directly related to having internal search results indexed on Google.
I am currently building an industry-specific small business directory (ex: Plumber) in Wordpress. The way I initially set it up is that when the user gets on the home page (ex: Find Plumbers in your area), they select the location they are interested in from a dropdown (ex: Miami) and the site returns a list of Plumbers that serve this location. I set up the results page as being an Archive that displays results linked to the search query, in this case, a location. The URLs of the search results look like www.company.com/plumber/?_location=Miami.
This said, I am not expecting people to find my home page on Google, but rather a specific location, which is an internal search result.
While everyone seems to agree that internal search results are not supposed to be indexed, my alternative would be to build a page for every location, which would create hundreds of new pages with duplicate content (I have a FAQ about how to select the best plumber on the same page below the results).
I also looked around and Yelp has a similar approach for the location results (ex: https://www.yelp.ca/search?cflt=plumbing&find_loc=Toronto%2C+ON)
Any thoughts on this use case?
Thanks
-
That's a great question. If you have pages that are generating revenue and ranking really well. I'd be hesitant to remove them from the index. Like the article mentions, Wayfair generates a huge amount of search traffic through these auto-generated internal search pages. If these are considered high quality and ranking well in Google, I would probably recommend leaving them alone.
If you want to trim some of these down, I'd use Google Analytics to find ones that aren't generating organic traffic/revenue. You could consider adding the "noindex" tag to those.
In general it is best practice to remove internal search pages from Google as they can contribute to a large amount of index bloat. However, I wouldn't reduce any that you see are performing well.
I'd be happy to take a look if you have any other questions!
-
I don't think that you should be looking at those from a SEO perspective. Why? If some people landed there through the search engines, this means that they have found the result in the SERP useful. This is much more important that the SEO. There are many who work for SEO, but do not manage to attract interest from those who search Google or other SE. So, keep and develop you internal search pages.
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
-
Using Product Page Content from an Offline Website
Hi all, We have two websites. One of the website's no longer sells product range A. However, on the second website, we would like to sell range A. We paid a copywriter to write some really good content for these ranges and we were wondering if we would get stung for duplicate content if we took these descriptions from website 1 and placed them on website 2. The products / descriptions are live anymore and haven't been for about 6 weeks. We're ranking for some great keywords at the moment and we don't want to spoil that. Thanks in advance! D
Technical SEO | | 10dales0 -
Cant find internal links on one of my pages.
When I run open site explorer for www.kingremodeling.com/ss.php?pid=5 it says there are 40 links to it on my site. However, I cannot find these links on any of the pages that open site explorer lists such as my homepage www.KingRemodeling.com. Totally confused!
Technical SEO | | allb830 -
If the order of products on a page changes each time the page is loaded, does this have a negative effect on the SEO of those pages?
Hello, a client of mine has a number of category pages that each have a list of products. Each time the page is reloaded the order of those products changes. Does this have a negative effect on the pages' rankings? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kerry_Jones2 -
My website internal pages are not getting cached with latest data
In our website we have sector list, in home page main category list is displayed click on main category user has to select sub category and reach the result page. EX: Agriculture->Agribusiness->Rice Agriculture page is indexed,but Agribusiness and Rice page is not getting cached,it is showing old indexed date as 23 July 2013,but i have submitted the sitemaps after this 4 times, and some url i have submitted manually in web master tool, but after this also my pages are not cached recently, Please suggest the solution and what might be the problem Thank you In Advance, Anne
Technical SEO | | Vidyavati0 -
How to Delete a Page on the Web?
Google reports and I have confirmed that the following old page is presenting on the Web. http://www.audiobooksonline.com/The_Great_American_Baseball_Box_Greatest_Moments_from_the_Last_80_Years_original_audio_collection_compact_discs.html This page hasn't been in our site's directory for some time and is no longer needed by us. What is the best way to fix this Google reported crawl error?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Should search pages be disallowed in robots.txt?
The SEOmoz crawler picks up "search" pages on a site as having duplicate page titles, which of course they do. Does that mean I should put a "Disallow: /search" tag in my robots.txt? When I put the URL's into Google, they aren't coming up in any SERPS, so I would assume everything's ok. I try to abide by the SEOmoz crawl errors as much as possible, that's why I'm asking. Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
No. of links on a page
Is it true that If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for Filter Search result pages--Why?
Hi, We're getting 'Yellow' Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for URLS that are in effect product search filter result pages (see link below) on our Magento ecommerce shop. Our Robot txt file to my mind is correctly set up i.e. we would not want Google to index these pages. So why does SeoMoz flag this type of page as a warning? Is there any implication for our ranking? Is there anything we need to do about this? Thanks. Here is an example url that SEOMOZ thinks that the search engines can't see. http://www.site.com/audio-books/audio-books-in-english?audiobook_genre=132 Below are the current entries for the robot.txt file. User-agent: Googlebot
Technical SEO | | languedoc
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /.js$
Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /utm
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Sitemap:0