Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.

[lcourse]

I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales).

My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead.

Would you noindex this page or not?

Any thoughts?

[MikeRoberts]

Google Webmaster Guidelines suggests you should "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."

[simon_realbuzz]

This was covered by Matt Cutts in a blog post way back in 2007 but the advice is still the same as Mik has pointed out. Search results could be considered to be thin content and not particularly useful to users so you can understand why Google want to avoid seeing search results in search result pages.  Certainly I block all search results in robots.txt for all out sites.

You may lose 4% of your search traffic in the short term, but in the long term it could mean that you gain far more.

[lcourse]

Mike, Everett,
thanks a lot. Will go ahead and noindex.

Our navigation path is easy to crawl.
So I add noindex, nofollow in meta or xrobots tag?

We have thousands of site search pages already in the google index, so I understand x rotobs or meta tag are preferred to using robots.txt right?

[MikeRoberts]

Since numerous search results pages are already in the index then Yes, you want to use the NoIndex tag instead of a disallow. The NoIndex tag will slowly lead to the pages being removed from the SERPs and the cache.

[CleverPhD]

One other thing to think about - do you have another method for your the bots to find/crawl your content?

We robot.txt all of our /search result pages - I agree with Everett's post they are thin content and ripe for duplication issues.

We list all content pages in sitemap.xml and have a single section to "browse content" that is paginated.  We use re="next" and "prev" to help the bots walk through each page.

References

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744

Personally, I think Maile's video is really great and you get to see some of the cool artwork in her house.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Important to note that if you do setup pagination, if you add any other filters or sort options in that pagination, no follow those links and noindex those result pages as you want to have only one route through your pagination for Goog to travel through. Also, make sure each page has a unique title and description, I just add Page N to the standard blurb for each page and that usually takes care of it.

If you close one door on your search pages, you can open another one using pagination!

Cheers!