Search Pages outranking Product Pages

[TheCraig]

A lot of the results seen in the search engines for our site are pages from our search results on our site, i.e. Widgets | Search Results

This has happened over time and wasn't intentional, but in many cases we see our search results pages appearing over our actual product pages in search, which isn't ideal.

Simply blocking indexing of these pages via robots wouldn't be ideal, at least all at once as we would have that period of time where those Search Results pages would be offline and our product pages would still be at the back of ranking.

Any ideas on a strategy to replace these Search Results with the actual products in a way that won't hurt us too bad during the transition?  Or a way to make the actual product pages rank above the search results?  Currently, it is often the opposite.

Thanks!

Craig

[Travis-W]

We had the same problem, but decided to embrace it.

I started optimizing and adding content to a few of the search results pages (and made them static, not dynamic) and now they rank fairly well.

However, for dynamic search pages I suggest you noindex them.
Google recommends it, and it's best to follow their recommendations.

[TheCraig]

Thanks Zora!  Yeah, these are all going to be dynamic unfortunately, and there are a lot of them.  In the hundreds of thousands.  So, we would need some type of transition strategy.  I would be concerned that a one time no-index all at once would be quite problematic.

Just curious if anyone else had to transition in this way and was able to do so successfully.

Thanks for the feedback!!

Craig

[Inductive_Automation]

I would be careful about allowing search pages to continually index. You will most likely end up with hundreds if not thousands of low value pages that may cause you to fall into a Panda algo penalty.  Simply do a site:yoururl.com inurl:search (or whatever parameter you use ) to see how many pages you have indexed for search results.

You could find the page search pages that are out ranking your product page and 301 them if the traffic is substantial. Otherwise, I would say that by noindexing the search pages, you should reduce the competition for those product pages and they should start to rank and hopefully convert better.

I've had to do the the same for several sites because of a panda penalty so I can't speculate on  traffic levels.

[TheCraig]

Thanks Jesse.  Sounds like a big undertaking, but something we need to move on.  Question...  How accurate is "site:yoururl.com inurl:search"?  I just did a test on it and the number of results that came back is way lower than what it should have been based on how our sitemaps are shown to be indexed in webmastertools.

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

Craig

[TheCraig]

Oh, and also, just to clarify.... Are you saying what we should do is 301:

http://oursite.com/SearchResult.html?Text=Monkeys+Ate+Soul

to, let's say

http://oursite.com/ProductPage.html?Title=TheMonkeysAteMySoul

That would be ok?

Thanks!

[Everett]

Hello Craig,

I've dealt with this issue on several client sites and typically opt for noindexing the search pages (sometimes even blocking in Robots.txt) as recommended by others here - especially if you can't make any of them static.

In terms of the product pages, it could be helpful to the visitor if they search for "Specific Product A" for you to just go ahead and land them on the "Specific Product A" page, either via a 301 redirect from the search result page, or by serving up the product page in the first place. This would take care of usability as well as your issue with search engines.

I would not gradually implement something here, as that could be even more confusing to search engines. Do you want the search pages indexed or not?

What I have seen is a temporary blip in traffic (a few weeks at most) followed by improvement in traffic due to an improvement in product page rankings as a result. Every situation is different though, and this assumes good implementation.

Looking at this from Google's perspective, understand that they ARE the search engine so why would they want to send the user to yet another set of search results? Google should know which page on your site to send visitors. They don't need an intermediary, which is why their guidelines say this:

"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."

Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

[TheCraig]

Thanks again for the answers!

Yeah, totally getting you on the Search within search issue.  Wish we had known about that a couple of years ago.  Did an analytics check and most of our non-home page traffic is coming from Search Results in serps.  According to inurl, we have about 200,000 indexed SearchResult pages and based on some data I pulled up, they are our highest traffic non-home page pages, but also the least converting.

I think 301 re-directs on these would be rather tricky.  I mean, if someone does a search on our site, they should get the search results page showing them several options, not be shot directly to a single product which might not be the one they need. It would be rather confusing for our regular customers as well.

But I agree we need to do something here, because conversely, our product pages, while getting the least traffic are the highest converters.

My only thought is that we would need to:

1.  Find a list of all of the indexed Search Result pages, or at least the ones that have been hit over the last year or so.  What would be the best way to do that?  Screaming Frog?  Analytics?

2.  Create a script that analyzes these for the keywords used in them and find a suitable item to re-direct to based on the keyword extracted.

3.  301 re-direct them.

4.  Change our current search results urls to include something that would not be included in these original pages so separate them from the old pages that are now being re-directed so that current searchers don't get re-directed as well.

5.  Set the search results pages to no - index.  Is that the best way to handle that?  If we did robots.txt, then we would be breaking the link flow of the site wouldn't we?  Don't we need the bots to crawl the search pages to lead to the product pages, or is the sitemap all that is needed?

Thanks for the time and answers!

Craig