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
-
Internal pages ranking over the homepage: How to optimise to rank better at Google?
Hi, We have experienced a shift in SERP from internal pages ranking over website homepage for more than a year. Previously website homepages used to rank for the primary keyword like moz.com for "SEO". Now we can see that internal pages like moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo been ranking for the primary keyword "SEO". Google is picking up these "what is ABC" pages than the homepage. All our competitor sites are ranking with these internal pages which are about "what is (primary keyword)". We do have the same internal pages "what is....", but this pages is not ranking; only our homepage is ranking. Moreover we dropped more than 15 positions after this shift in SERP. How to diagnose this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google Custom Search Engine: Good Idea?
I created a Google Custom Search Engine for our site, but I"m not sure implementing it is a good idea. When I tested it with the public URL, I noticed that ads show up on the search engine that could potentially move visitors away from our site to our competitors. Has anyone had success with implementing a Google Custom Search Engine? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Thanks, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Search Console - Average position vs Page Views
Hello, I would like to find out relation between Average position and Views, one of our sites have strange activity.Average position going up but Views going down in Google Webmaster tools. I mention exactly views to be more specific because clicks could fluctuate due to CTR but views should stay the same. Anyone can describe what could going on ? I notice on other sites that on some days when Average Position drops 50% less than normal views going up on some day, but overall I can not see any relation ship between Average Position and Views.
Algorithm Updates | | logoderivv0 -
Dealing with Omitted Page
For my most competitive term, the wrong page ranks (and not well either). The landing page I built for it has never shown up for that term except after I include the omitted results. The page that does rank is category page page above it. All that's fine, because neither page was all that great...BUT, I have completely re-written the content for the landing page, got local area pictures, local testimonials and a video. So here's my question: Should I put all that content on the landing page that's been omitted or tweak the page that ranks and put it there? To me it makes the most sense to put the content on the page that has been omitted, but I don't know how google treats pages that have been omitted in the past. Is it going to have some sort of bias against the page, because it was omitted so many times earlier for that keyword? Or, will it be treated just like any other page, and if the content is good enough, then it will rank just fine. If anyone's dealt with this, then I'd love to hear all about it! Thanks, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
301'ing old (2000), high PR, high pages indexed domain
Hi, I have an old (2000), very high PR, 20M+ pages indexed by goog domain which... got adsense banned. The domain has taken a few hits over the years from penguin/panda, but come out pretty well compared to many competitors. The problem is it was adsense banned in the big adsense acct ban of 2012 for invalid activity. No, I still have no idea what the issue was. I'd like to start using a new domain if I can safely get goog to pass the PR & indexing love so I can run adsense & Adx. What are your initial thoughts? Am I out of my mind to try?
Algorithm Updates | | comfortsteve1 -
Google is really NOT SAYING IN "HOW SEARCH WORKS” ?
Hi All SEOmoz members and team, As I was reading this, is it true that Google does this . Simply, I don't think so, I haven't experienced any of such what is being talked [http://www.fairsearch.org/search-manipulation/what-google-isnt-saying-in-how-search-works/ C](http://www.fairsearch.org/search-manipulation/what-google-isnt-saying-in-how-search-works/ "http://www.fairsearch.org/search-manipulation/what-google-isnt-saying-in-how-search-works/")ome on, let us discuss the real thing about Google. Teginder Ravi
Algorithm Updates | | Futura0 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
When did Google include display results per page into their ranking algorithm?
It looks like the change took place approx. 1-2 weeks ago. Example: A search for "business credit cards" with search settings at "never show instant results" and "50 results per page", the SERP has a total of 5 different domains in the top 10 (4 domains have multiple results). With the slider set at "10 results per page", there are 9 different domains with only 1 having multiple results. I haven't seen any mention of this change, did I just miss it? Are they becoming that blatant about forcing as many page views as possible for the sake of serving more ads?
Algorithm Updates | | BrianCC0