Should I block google indexing "search.php"
-
My question is I have a search page on our website , you can search by date, number of people staying and so on, I am just wondering should block this in the robots.txt ? Because we have pretty URL'S already for searching by county and searching by towns. I cannot see any benefit of having e.g
"search/search.php?sp_dateFrom=16%2F12%2F2015&sp_dateTo=23%2F12%2F2015&sec_drop%5B%5D=727&spesh_town_id=764&q=&occupants=5&bedrooms=3&submit=SEARCH#search" indexed. Would I be correct in doing this ?
-
Second confirmation ;-), he's right. It's one of the things that for bigger sites really could get you in trouble.
-
That is the answer I was looking for, I was thinking along those lines. The problem was that Seo software was coming up with duplicate content because of different variations of the search parameters. Thanks very much for a clear and precise answer and taking time to explain this.
-
You want to block Google from any URL that produces a search result that is essentially a resorting or refiltering of a master list of search results that they have already crawled/indexed.
If you already have a set of pages that lets Google crawl all the pages in your site (could be all the products in your store, all the articles in your blog, etc), having Google crawl through variants of that same page causes a couple of problems. 1) You are wasting Google's time in spidering pages that it has already seen, vs having Google crawl your more important pages. Depending on how you have these setup, you may end up sending Google into an endless loop of non-important pages to crawl 2) You are creating pages that are generally low quality, have nothing truly original on them, they will not rank for anything anyway and may give the impression that your site consists of primarily low quality pages.
What I show Google is a single simple path to browse my content. For a blog this would be a chronological listing of articles that is paginated so that Google and the user can browse from my most recent to my oldest articles. For an ecommerce page, I might setup basic category pages, make sure the category pages have great content on them and then allow Google to crawl back through all the products based on those main category pages. If I have some products in 2 or 3 categories I do not sweat it. If on either of these examples, I show the user options to resort, filter, etc the results, I block Google with a nofollow or with robots.txt.
In your example, you already have "pretty" URLs by country and town, keep those, that will let Google and your users find your content and also provide context around that content. The crazy a$$ search URL you show is handy for your PHP code to give a search result, but would just waste Google's time. Unless you think it would be useful for a user to save the search URL results, I would see if there is a way to simply hide all the parameters from the user (submit the parameters using a POST vs a GET request for example) so that all they see in the URL result is /search/search.php
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
-
Index SEO Performance
Hi guys, I was wondering if there is a difference in SEO performance between a page which ends with .html or just with a slash. For example: www.domain.com/test/ - www.domain.com/test.html Which one is better? And is there a difference between productpages and productcategory pages. Because we see mostly productpages ending with .html and category pages ending with a slash. Take a look at some big dutch companies like: http://www.coolblue.nl/
On-Page Optimization | | Happy-SEO
http://www.bol.com/
https://www.zalando.nl/ (product page) There are doing this with a reason.... i guess.... Thanks.1 -
How do I "leverage browser caching"
Google is telling me to "leverage browser caching" and put a freshness factor of 1 week on images used on my site. http://www.1stclassdriving.co.uk.
On-Page Optimization | | brianw10
Try as i may I cannot find out how to do this. I'm running two sites - http://www.1stclassdriving.co.uk. on a shared hosting package with Easyspace and http://www.croydondrivingschool.co.uk with Fasthosts, both under windows with asp scripting. Can anyone point me to any tutorials or guide me as to how I do this please0 -
Does Google index dynamically generated content/headers, etc.?
To avoid dupe content, we are moving away from a model where we have 30,000 pages, each with a separate URL that looks like /prices/<product-name>/<city><state>, often with dupe content because the product overlaps from city to city, and it's hard to keep 30,000 pages unique, where sometimes the only distinction is the price & the city/state.</state></city></product-name> We are moving to a model with around 300 unique pages, where some of the info that used to be in the url will move to the page itself (headers, etc.) to cut down on dupe content on those unique 300 pages. My question is this. If we have 300 unique-content pages with unique URL's, and we then put some dynamic info (year, city, state) into the page itself, will Google index this dynamic content? The question behind this one is, how do we continue to rank for searches for that product in the city-state being searched without having that info in the URL? Any best practices we should know about?
On-Page Optimization | | editabletext0 -
Google cached snapshots and last indexed
My question is I noticed today that the snap shots of my main pages were outdated. About a month. Then I clicked on the "Learn More" link about cahced images and Google says "Google crawls the web and takes snapshots of each page. When you click Cached, you'll see the webpage as it looked when we last indexed it." I know this sounds really dumb, but does that really mean the last time Google indexed that page? So the changes I have made since then have not been taken yet?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Indexed pages in Google webmaster tools
Hi Mozzers, Very quick question. Google WM tools interface has updated and I want to confirm I'm looking at the correct figure. If I look up 'Your site on the web' / 'search queries' / then the 'pages' - this is correct indexation figure yes? This differs from the 'site:' command but that's always the case. Can anyone confirm, Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Bush_JSM0 -
Www vs "non" www site addresses and SEO
I first apologize for the lame question title - didn't really know how to word it... I'm having a bit of a conundrum and cannot figure out whats going on, but in the mean time I thought I would ask to see if its hurting my ranking. My site at www.ap-mg.com is built on WordPress using the Thesis them by DIY (just a little upfront info). I am very careful to make sure that all my links are in a particular format i.e. http://www.ap-mg.com - on my site, as well as other sites I have my profile on. My site also used to be hosted on the /home directory until about a month ago. My problem is that when I click on the DA MoxBar link while at my sites homepage, it takes me to Open Explorer, but to ap-mg.com and shows no results - I then add the www to the front of the address and vuala - results. But then the second issue I'm having is then it tells me that my site is redirecting the the /home directory, which its not and I'm still trying to figure that one out. So with all the craziness with my site, www, no www, /home....is this killing any chance of real ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | apmgsmith0 -
Should I make All My "Non-Money" Pages No-Follow?
I'm branching out here from my novice seo status . . . In an effort to channel page rank to the pages I wish to rank for should I make all my non-money pages no-follow. Pages like "contact us", "about us", "application", etc. It seems to make sense to make these no follow so the page rank flows to the pages I wish to rank for. Am I on the right track?
On-Page Optimization | | leaseman0 -
Getting pages indexed by Google
Hi SEOMoz, I relaunched a site back in February of this year (www.uniquip.com) with about 1 million URL's. Right now I'm seeing that Google is not going past 110k indexed URL's (based on sitemaps). Do you have any tips on what I can do to make the site more likeable by Google and get more indexed URL's? All the the part pages can be browsed to by going to: http://www.uniquip.com/product-line-card/suppliers/sw-a/p-1 I've tried to make the content as unique as possible by adding random testimonials and random "related part numbers" see here: http://www.uniquip.com/id/246172/electronic-components/infineon/microcontrollers-mcu/sabc161pilfca Do I need to wait more time and be more patient with Google? It just seems like I'm only getting a few thousand URL's per day at the most. Would it help me if I implemented a breadcrumb on all part pages? Thanks, -Carlos
On-Page Optimization | | caneja0