Indexing of Search Pages

[Bio-RadAbs]

I have a question on indexing search pages of an ecommerce or any website. I read Google doesn't recommend this and sites shouldn't allow indexing of their search pages.

I recently attended an SEO event (BrightonSEO) and one of the talks was on search pages and how big players like eBay, Amazon do index their search pages. In fact, it is a core part of the pages that are indexed.

eBay has to do it, as their product pages are on a time frame and Amazon only allows certain category search pages to be indexed. Reviewing my competitors, they are indexing search pages and this is why they have thousands and millions of web pages indexed.

What are your thoughts? I thought search pages were too dynamic (URL strings) and they wouldn't have a unique page title, meta description or rich content to act as a well optimised page.

Am I missing a trick here?

Cyto

[renehansen]

I can see the issue with auctionbased e-commerce sites. But a search result page could be both dynamic and static:

domain.com/results/name-of-search-string

or

domain.com/results/?q=something

I think that optimizing a search result page would be rather difficult since it depends on a unique search which is inpredictable. However, using a static URL for a result page is no good either, as it creates a ton of pages in an index with no meaning.

I wouldn't think that any common site should index their search result pages.

[DirkC]

Hi,

If you read this article (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/) - the official guideline is "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". **(added the bold)

The question is: what is a search result page.  if you're selling LCD tv's - the page which is showing only Panasonic tv's could be considered a search result from a query on the site, but it could also be considered as a page which offers value for users searching for a Panasonic LCD tv. Idem if you look for 'jobs in Montreal' - one of the first results is http://ca.indeed.com/jobs-in-Montréal,-QC - which is the same result that you would get if you would search Montreal on http://ca.indeed.com/

If these sites didn't index these "search results pages" they would almost never show up in the SERP's. I think the important part is "adding value for the users".

On dynamic search pages (or facetted navigation) Google even made best practices (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html) - even though you could consider all these kind of pages as search results.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk

[PatrickDelehanty]

Fantastic as always, Dirk!

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hmm, so what it comes down to is that, you can index search pages but provided they have a purpose or add value to the end user.

For instance, A user would search by category whereas an individual product search result isn't necessary when a product page exists.

Thanks Dirk for the links, helps a lot

Cyto