Duplicate content on SearchResults.asp

[giddygrafix]

hi guys. I'm currently working through the reported crawl errors in Moz Analytics, but an unsure what to do about some of them. for example...

Searchresults.asp?search=frankie+says+relax

is showing as having duplicate page content and page title as

SearchResults.asp?searching=Y&sort=13&search=Frankie+Says+Relax&show=24

There's all sorts of searchresults.asp page being flagged. Is this something i can safely ignore or is it something i should endeavour to rectify?

I'm also getting errors reported on shoppingcart.asp pages as well as pindex.asp (product index).

I'm thinking i should maybe add disallow/ shoppingcart.asp to my robots text file, but am unsure as to whether i should be blocking robots from the search results pages and product index (which is essentially a secondary sitemap).

Any advice would be greatly appreaciated.

Thanks, Dave

[Keszi]

Hi Dave,

Personally I would put a noindex, follow on all three of these pages.

The question to you would be the following: Do you think, that if someone would land on your website to one of these pages, would it deliver value for them?

The single item, that in my belief should be analyzed is the search pages. I'd check from Google Analytics if there is any organic traffic to these pages, compare it with the current pages that are on my site. And IF I find any new queries which I do not cover with my current pages/categories, I would create one for them.

I hope it helped. Gr., Keszi

[Hutch42]

Dave,

Your best bet to keep these pages indexed but not have duplicate content issues is to add code that will place a canonical tag on search pages based on the original search query so that even when additional information was caused to load into the URL, such as your example, it would point back to the base page.  If you do not want these pages indexed at all you can do what Keszi said or block all search pages using your robots.txt.

I would not block your product pages or search pages but I agree with blocking your shopping cart funnel.

Google official explanation of canonical and some common mistakes Google sees when they are implemented.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

[giddygrafix]

Thank you both, really helpful