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.
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
-
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Create Page Titles from H1 using Yoast?
I'm working on a site that has 280 blog posts that have either been migrated from an old CMS site or created on the Dev version of the new WordPress site. We've written 280 unique meta descriptions so they don't truncate but it there a quick way I can export the current H1s and then import them into Yoast so they are set as the Page Titles? I've written unique Page Titles and meta descriptions for all the Service and Products page and just want a way to speed up the blog posts as their H1s are really good and what I would use as Page Titles anyway. Any help, greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Is there a limit to Internal Redirect?
I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs. I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that? Please let me know if the question is not clear.
Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
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 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
Redirecting Entire Microsite Content to Main Site Internal Pages?
I am currently working on improving site authority for a client site. The main site has significant authority, but I have learned that the company owns several other resource-focused microsites which are stagnant, but which have accrued significant page authority of their own (thought still less than the main site). Realizing the fault in housing good content on a microsite rather than the main site, my thought is that I can redirect the content of the microsites to internal pages on the main site as a "Resources" section. I am wondering a: if this is a good idea and b: the best way to transfer site authority from these microsites. I am also wondering how to organize the content and if, for example, an entire microsite domain (e.g. microsite.com) should in fact be redirected to internal resource pages (e.g. mainsite.com/resources). Any input would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RightlookCreative1