Does having '?search' in a URL affect the page quality?

[CostumeD]

In our Costume Themes category on our website, http://www.costumedirect.com.au/themes/, the links direct to search pages with URLs containing the term '?search'. For example, the 'Edward Scissorhands' link directs to http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward. Will the question mark and 'search' in our URL affect the page quality and rankings? Thank you.

[UmarKhan]

Hi Li,

It's a common problem in E-Commerce sites. Remember, Google crawls dynamic URLs  so I wouldn't say it will deadly harm your page but yes that URL structure is not considered as SEO friendly and it carries some weigh to effect a bit.

So my recommendation is to go with SEO base friendly URLs and set a canonical tag that will tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use dynamic URLs like http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the final.

Hope this helps!

Umar

[seoman10]

Morning Li,

Like Umar said, It's properly not to detrimental again I would say best avoided if it could be removed, words in URLs are taken into account by search engines.

If the URL is: http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward

The search engine will see something like this: costumedirect com au search search query edward

And it will try to match it with the search term used, so if you have unnecessary words the search term will become less relevant.

Sorry hope that isn't too much in-depth let me know if you need me to go into more detail or explain a little more.

All the best.

[Everett]

Google recommends blocking all Internal Search Results in the Robots.txt file. I suggest creating a product collection or category for Edward Scissorhands Themed Costumes and linking to that instead. This way you can customize the content on the page just as if it was any other category page.