Should I block google indexing "search.php"

[McCaldin]

My question is I have a search page on our website , you can search by date, number of people staying and so on, I am just wondering should block this in the robots.txt ? Because we have pretty URL'S already for searching by county and searching by towns.  I cannot see any benefit of having  e.g

"search/search.php?sp_dateFrom=16%2F12%2F2015&sp_dateTo=23%2F12%2F2015&sec_drop%5B%5D=727&spesh_town_id=764&q=&occupants=5&bedrooms=3&submit=SEARCH#search"   indexed.  Would I be correct in doing this ?

[CleverPhD]

You want to block Google from any URL that produces a search result that is essentially a resorting or refiltering of a master list of search results that they have already crawled/indexed.

If you already have a set of pages that lets Google crawl all the pages in your site (could be all the products in your store, all the articles in your blog, etc), having Google crawl through variants of that same page causes a couple of problems.  1) You are wasting Google's time in spidering pages that it has already seen, vs having Google crawl your more important pages.  Depending on how you have these setup, you may end up sending Google into an endless loop of non-important pages to crawl 2) You are creating pages that are generally low quality, have nothing truly original on them, they will not rank for anything anyway and may give the impression that your site consists of primarily low quality pages.

What I show Google is a single simple path to browse my content.  For a blog this would be a chronological listing of articles that is paginated so that Google and the user can browse from my most recent to my oldest articles.  For an ecommerce page, I might setup basic category pages, make sure the category pages have great content on them and then allow Google to crawl back through all the products based on those main category pages.   If I have some products in 2 or 3 categories I do not sweat it.    If on either of these examples, I show the user options to resort, filter, etc the results, I block Google with a nofollow or with robots.txt.

In your example, you already have "pretty" URLs by country and town, keep those, that will let Google and your users find your content and also provide context around that content.    The crazy a$$ search URL you show is handy for your PHP code to give a search result, but would just waste Google's time.   Unless you think it would be useful for a user to save the search URL results, I would see if there is a way to simply hide all the parameters from the user (submit the parameters using a POST vs a GET request for example) so that all they see in the URL result is /search/search.php

Good luck!

[McCaldin]

That is the answer I was looking for, I was thinking along those lines.  The problem was that Seo software was coming up with duplicate content because of different variations of the search parameters.  Thanks very much for a clear and precise answer and taking time to explain this.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Second confirmation ;-), he's right. It's one of the things that for bigger sites really could get you in trouble.