350 (Out the 750) Internal Links Listed by Webmaster Tools Dynamically Generated-Best to Remove?

[Kingalan1]

Greetings MOZ Community:

When visitors enter real estate search parameters in our commercial real estate web site, the parameters are somehow getting indexed as internal links in Google Webmaster Tools. About half are 700 internal links are derived from these dynamic URLs.

It seems to me that these dynamic alphanumeric URL links would dilute the value of the remaining static links.

Are the dynamic URLs a major issue? Are they high priority to remove?

The dynamic URLs look like this:

/listings/search?fsrepw-search-neighborhood%5B%5D=m_0&fsrepw-search-sq-ft%5B%5D=1&fsrepw-search-price-range%5B%5D=4&fsrepw-search-type-of-space%5B%5D=0&fsrepw-search-lease-type=1

These URLs do not show up when a  SITE: URL search is done on Google!

[DennisSeymour]

I have seen both sides of the coin, some get affected, most don't.

I prefer to clean it up though and make sure those can't get indexed. I do this as part of our onpage SEO standards. We dont proceed until it's dealt with so it's a high priority.

It's cleaner, gets crawled easily and more efficient. Doesn't hurt

[Kingalan1]

Hi Dennis:

The pages that display these search results are set to no-index, no-follow. They do not get indexed by Google in search results, just somehow register as about 200 links in internal links in Google Webmaster Tools.

How would I get these removed as links if they are no getting indexed by Google as pages? If I did get them removed is there a way of getting these links from being re-indexed?

I have attached an image of what these internal links look like in Google Webmaster Tools.

Thanks, Alan

EjzuzEK

[justin-brock]

I believe your problem is in your robots.txt file. You're attempting a wildcard blocking of the search results pages with this line:

Disallow: /listings/search**?***

However, the asterisk ought to precede the question mark. If you want to block all URLs that include a question mark (?), do this:

Disallow: /listings/search***?**

Try that and see what happens. I've also found Aaron Wall's article on robots.txt to be helpful. Good luck!

Also, adding "noindex, nofollow" to the section does not necessarily keep a web page out of Google's index. When you think about it, you realize Google has to crawl the page the see that meta tag in the first place. Robots.txt is much stronger.