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Hello,

We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue.

We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty .

We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages.

Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages.

All thoughts or recommendations are welcome.

Thanks

I love using seomoz and have done for a few years. I am no SEO expert, but like to think I can get away with making out I know what I'm on about!

I use opensiteexplorer regualrly and usually enjoy delving deeper into it's metrics, but one thing is bothering me (before I start with this, please forgive me if I am missing something obvious - you may have to point it out in your answer!)

So I run a comparison of a few sites and pay attention to the external followed links section. On checking this number at root domain level, company A has 12,666 external followed links. So I want to dig a little deeper as to the qulaity of those links and click along to the inbound links tab, here I select the following:

"followed & 301" > "only external" > "all links to this root domain" > leaving the results ungrouped

Downloading this table I only have results for 3,416 links - why such a big difference to the previous 12,666 or am I missing something here?

Would just like a bit of clarification

Thanks for all your responses :).  My main concern here is 301 redirecting mistyped/ incorrectly entered URL s to the “All categories” page rather than returning a custom 404 page. Will this be problematic for SEO???

Hi I would like to have a second opinion on this. I am working on an ecommerce website that they 301 redirect all 404 pages (including the URLs entered incorrectly) to the “All categories page”. Will this have any negative SEO impact?