Huh not sure since I'm not a developer (and didn't work on that website dev) but I'd say all of the above^^. If useful, here are their url structure, there's two kind :

• /searchpage.htm?action=search&pagenumber=xx&query=product+otherterms

So I guess they are generated when a user makes a search

paginated (about 15 pages generally),

and I can approximately know how much they are duplicates, I can tell some are probably overlapping when there's a lot of variations for the product. There are just a few complete duplicates (when the product searched is the same with different added terms, doesn't happen a lot in this list).

• /searchpage-searchterm-addedterm-number.htm

Those I find surprising, I don't know if they are pages generated with a fixed url, or if they are rewritten (Haven't looked at the htaccess yet, but I will, god I have a headache just thinking about reading that thing lol)

There's about a thousand of them all (from GGanalytics, about half of each sort, and nearly all are indexed by Google), on a website with about 12 thou total in pages.

Maybe the traffic loss will be compensated by the removed competition between those search pages and the product pages (and the rel=canonical is surely way less brutal than a noindex for that matter), but without experience in these kind of situations it's hard to make a decision...

Really appreciate you guys taking the time to help !

Not a lot of real duplicates, they're more alike, and the most visited are unique, so I'll keep the most important ones and just toss a few duplicates.

Thanks a lot for your help, problem solved !

Thanks for your answer

Ok you're saying indeed it will act like a noindex over time.

So if one of the result page would have ranked for a particular query, it will not rank any more, like with a noindex => it will lose the 13% of traffic it generated...

Otherwise it would be too easy to make a page rank for the keywords used in a bunch of other pages that refer to it via rel=canonical... wouldn't it ?

I'm starting to think I can't do anything... Maybe just noindex a bunch of them that cause duplicates, and leave the rest in the index.

Hi everyone,

I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I  know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem.

The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!!

I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too...

The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this)

Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless...

Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ?

Thanks a million