Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What To Do?

by jminot
2 replies
  • SEO
  • |
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.... The issue we're facing is, certain internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine 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'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.


Cheers
#google #indexing #internal #results #search
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    It's a CMS which means it's working with a theme/template, so noindex the search.php (or whatever your search page name).

    Make sure you get the correct page with a noindex because any page that includes that tag will be removed from Google SERPs.
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  • Profile picture of the author AndresNWD
    This is a very tricky issue. I get you still don't want to manually deindex dynamic searches, but I actually thought those search results were not indexed by Google. Anyway, this might help you:

    To index or de-index internal search results pages? | Moz Q&A
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