Help! Optimizing dynamic internal search results pages...

[SteveOllington]

Hi guys,

Now I have always been against this, and opted to noindex internal search results pages to stop the waste of link juice, dupe content, and crawl loops... however, I'm in a discussion with somebody who feels there may be a solution, and that the pages could actually be optimized to rank (for different keywords to the landing pages of course).

Anybody come across such a thing before?

My only solution would be still to noindex and then build static pages with the most popular search results in but that won't suffice in this case.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated

Thanks,

Steve

[Keszi]

Hey Steve,

Yes there are possibilities for optimizing the dynamic pages, but I am on the same side with you, I would simply noindex the search result pages and focus my energy on other possibilities on the site.

Gr.,

Istvan

[SteveOllington]

Thanks Istvan,

What are the solutions you're thinking of if you were to go against best practice?

[Keszi]

Hi Steve,

Sorry for responding so late.

So whenever we have a situation as having many dynamic pages optimized, I always get back to the idea of Faceted Navigation. This way you will give the Search Engines one path to crawl to each products (but be aware that you will need to invest time and energy to have a well planned, structured navigation path).

What's the positive behind Faceted navigation:

• it will resolve the duplicate page flag on your products (giving search engines only one good specified path to crawl)
• it will raise the user experience as the visitors will have the chance to easily get to the desired product fast

The negatives:

• Are there any? - Ok, seriously speaking, you will need to sit down and think a lot of which path you choose, how to resolve it to be efficient, the web dev team will work a few days/weeks (depending on their other tasks, importance of their tasks, etc.)

What it will bring to your site (relative to what you have now): currently you have noindex on the "category" (basically a search page with a filter on it, right?) page. With faceted navigation this current structure will be completed with an "tree" structure to your final products on the specified path (that you have chosen).

I hope this is clear and helped!

Gr.

Istvan