Indexing of internal search results: canonicalization or noindex?
-
Hi Mozzers,
First time poster here, enjoying the site and the tools very much.
I'm doing SEO for a fairly big ecommerce brand and an issue regarding internal search results has come up.
www.example.com/electronics/iphone/5s/ gives an overview of the the model-specific listings. For certain models there are also color listings, but these are not incorporated in the URL structure.
Here's what Rand has to say in Inbound Marketing & SEO: Insights From The Moz Blog
Search filters are used to narrow an internal search—it could be price, color, features, etc.
Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter
URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop?price=1000
The solution here is similar to the preceding one—don’t index the filters. As long as Google
has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good.I believe using a noindex tag is meant here.
Let's say you want to point users to an overview of listings for black 5s iphones. The URL is an internal search filter which looks as follows:
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5s?search=black
Which you wish to link with the anchor text "black iphone 5s".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you no-index the black 5s search filters, you lose the equity passed through the link. Whereas if you canonicalize /electronics/apple/iphone/5s you would still leverage the link juice and help you rank for "black iphone 5s". Doesn't it then make more sense to use canonicalization?
-
Hi there,
Just to round this question off, you could canonicalise the query-string URL searching for black iPhones to the iPhone 5s listings page and keep an individual phone's lising at /123456 separate, yes. It's best to keep the canonical tag for truly duplicated or near-duplicated pages, so you would not want to canonicalise an individual product page to a listings page or similar.
-
The tag is good for duplicate content but if /123456 has unique content then you probably don't need the tag on it. I would refrain from trying to implement the tag on ? on larger terms as it will give you a headache.
Some handy tips here- http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
In Short -
Set up the tag on the filters e.g a page that's the same content but its showing the colour blue then it will feed back the juice to the original but if you've got a page that's not duplicate and has content on it then you could leave it be. Google's pretty clever at working out relationships on pages and duplicate content is not the worse problem for SEO.
Hope that helps!
-
I meant to say that /123456 is an individual listing and /5gs gives an overview of all listings.
Then I could include a canonical tag at /5gs?search=black pointing to /5gs and NOT include a canonical tag at /5gs/123456 because I want the individual listing to rank?
-
Assuming the info is the same content (duplicate) just with a colour etc.
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs/123456
I would put the tag on that page pointing towards:
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs
What the tag is doing is saying the page (123456) is a duplicate of the another page, here is the other page (the link in tag) then Google will put all relevant juice to the original.
The canonical tag is great for duplicate content but it by putting it on a page deeper in the structure it only affects that page not any others. You can sometimes get a bit ahead by trying to canonical pages that don't exists like www.exsample.com?yay
-
Thanks!
I have a follow up question :).
What if there are listings with unique IDs with the following URL structure:
www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs/123456
Then, canonicalizing /electronics/apple/iphone/5gs would prevent the listing from ranking.
What is best practice in these cases? Ideally I would like to pass link juice from the ?search filters to the canonical URL but leave the sub-directories as is.
-
Hi there,
Looks like you've gotten to the bottom of it there. The canonical tag is best as you wouldn't loose any link juice but it would get the desired effect of not indexing the filter.
Looks like you've got a handle on it so good luck!
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
-
How get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
Sitemap indexing
Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply1 -
301 redirect to search results page?
Hi - we just launched our redesigned website. On the previous site, we had multiple .html pages that contained links to supporting pdf documentation. On this new site, we no longer have those .html landing pages containing the links. The question came up, should we do a search on our site to gather a single link that contains all pdf links from the previous site, and set up a redirect? It's my understanding that you wouldn't want google to index a search results page on your website. Example: old site had the link http://www.oldsite.com/technical-documents.html new site, to see those same links would be like: http://www.newsite.com/resources/search?View+Results=&f[]=categories%3A196
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Index or noindex mobile version?
We have a website called imones.lt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
and we have a mobile version for it m.imones.lt We originally put noindex for m.imones.lt. Is it a good decision or no? We believe that if google indexes both it creates double content. We definitely don't want that? But when someone through google goes to any of imones.lt webpage using smartphone they are redirected to m.imones.lt/whatever Thank you for your opinion.0 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Penguin Apply To Internal Linking?
Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text? We've lost about 3,000 visitors a month since the rolling updates were implemented. I'm always careful not to over-react to algo updates but enough time has passed that I think the dust has settled. I try to stay white in all I do but I think if I've over-done anything its the internal linking related products/categories with exact match. My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Duplicate Sub-domains Being Indexed
Hi all, I have this site that has a sub-domain that is meant to be a "support" for clients. Some sort of FAQ pages, if you will. A lot of them are dynamic URLs, hence, the title and most of the content are duplicated. Crawl Diagnostics found 52 duplicate content, 138 duplicate title and a lot other errors. My question is, what would be the best practice to fix this issue? Should I noindex and nofollow all of its subdomains? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
Increasing index
Hi! I'm having some trouble getting Google to index pages which once had a querystring in them but now are being redirected with a 301. The pages have a lot of unique content but this doesn't seem to matter. I feels as if there stuck in limbo (or a sandbox 🙂 Any clues on how to fix this? Thanks / Niklas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KAN-Malmo0