Indexing of Search Pages
-
I have a question on indexing search pages of an ecommerce or any website. I read Google doesn't recommend this and sites shouldn't allow indexing of their search pages.
I recently attended an SEO event (BrightonSEO) and one of the talks was on search pages and how big players like eBay, Amazon do index their search pages. In fact, it is a core part of the pages that are indexed.
eBay has to do it, as their product pages are on a time frame and Amazon only allows certain category search pages to be indexed. Reviewing my competitors, they are indexing search pages and this is why they have thousands and millions of web pages indexed.
What are your thoughts? I thought search pages were too dynamic (URL strings) and they wouldn't have a unique page title, meta description or rich content to act as a well optimised page.
Am I missing a trick here?
Cyto
-
Hmm, so what it comes down to is that, you can index search pages but provided they have a purpose or add value to the end user.
For instance, A user would search by category whereas an individual product search result isn't necessary when a product page exists.
Thanks Dirk for the links, helps a lot
Cyto
-
Fantastic as always, Dirk!
-
Hi,
If you read this article (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/) - the official guideline is "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages **that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines". **(added the bold)
The question is: what is a search result page. if you're selling LCD tv's - the page which is showing only Panasonic tv's could be considered a search result from a query on the site, but it could also be considered as a page which offers value for users searching for a Panasonic LCD tv. Idem if you look for 'jobs in Montreal' - one of the first results is http://ca.indeed.com/jobs-in-Montréal,-QC - which is the same result that you would get if you would search Montreal on http://ca.indeed.com/
If these sites didn't index these "search results pages" they would almost never show up in the SERP's. I think the important part is "adding value for the users".
On dynamic search pages (or facetted navigation) Google even made best practices (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html) - even though you could consider all these kind of pages as search results.
Hope this clarifies,
Dirk
-
I can see the issue with auctionbased e-commerce sites. But a search result page could be both dynamic and static:
domain.com/results/name-of-search-string
or
domain.com/results/?q=something
I think that optimizing a search result page would be rather difficult since it depends on a unique search which is inpredictable. However, using a static URL for a result page is no good either, as it creates a ton of pages in an index with no meaning.
I wouldn't think that any common site should index their search result pages.
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
-
Searching for Compelling Hard Data on why B2B Websites Should Be Responsive
I am being asked to provide hard data in support the migration to a responsive website for a large B2B website. I have searched for any case studies showing before/after comparisons - no luck. I can easily show: Current data on desktop vs mobile visitors, their bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. Google Analytics Benchmark data - really compelling stuff there! In the past year, 100K visitors have come to the site from mobile devices. GWMTs shows the client not receiving mobile impressions for important keywords, All the close competitors have gone responsive. In APAC regions, mobile is more widely used than in the USA. BUT, I can’t show that making this expensive and time-consuming transition will result in more revenue. The client is a financial services software company, with a 2-3 year sales cycle. Has anyone seen data to support this transition? Thanks everyone! Have a great long weekend.
Algorithm Updates | | RosemaryB0 -
Links hovering at the bottom of a search result
Hey folks, Curious has to the how and why there are links at the bottom of this search query for "Justin Bieber Networth" for other celebrities, completely unrelated i.e. "harry styles, taylor swift" etc. http://imgur.com/DNXuyRW (also attached) Is this an SEO tool? How did they embed this into a search query? Thanks! Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 12.04.43 PM DNXuyRW
Algorithm Updates | | Anti-Alex0 -
What's the correct format when you Disavow a single page? with or without www.?
Hi Y'all. Can't seem to find an article on disavowing a single page. Do i use A, B, or submit both A and B? Example: A. http://disavowexample.com B. http://www.disavowexample.com Which one does Google prefer? I know for some I just find the canonical url of the page (which show www,) but wanted your expert advice! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Shawn1240 -
Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site
I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site. The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details: The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site. Questions: Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any? Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source? Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301? Would you 301 if this was your site? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
Search appearances drop, search traffic increases ... how to interpret?
I've just been comparing search appearances in Google Webmaster Tools with organic search traffic from Google and found that the two do not correspond at all. Why would this be? GWT says my appearances in search crash-dived around the second week of September (does this correspond with a Google algorithm update?), but my organic search data in Google Analytics for the same time period shows that search visits actually increased. Anyone else seeing anomalies like this? 525f2de7c58cc2-09483641 525f2e345acdf1-83344837
Algorithm Updates | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Using a stop word when optimizing pages
I have a page (for a spa) I am trying to fully optimize and, using AdWords have run every conceivable configuration (using Exact Match) to ascertain the optimal phrase to use. Unfortunately, the term which has come up as the 'best' phrase is "spas in XXX" [xxx represents a location]. When reviewing the data, phrases such as "spas XXX" or "spa XXX" doesn't give me an appropriate search volume to warrant optimizing. So, with that said, do I optimize the page without the word "in", and 'hope' we get the search volume for searches using the word "in", or optimize using the stop word? Any thoughts? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | MarketingAgencyFlorida0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Why am i seeing a "conduit" line for search engine sources in Google Analytics ?
Among Google, Yahoo, Bing etc... One of the line is "Conduit". I never heard about this engine but, accordingly to Google Analytics metrics, it is the engine that bring the best traffic to my site in terms of pages per visit.
Algorithm Updates | | betadvisor0