Search pages showing up as soft 404 in WMT

[nomad-202323]

Hi ....we are getting allot of "site search" pages showing up in wmt as soft 404's and wanted to know what the best would be to stop this. All search pages are already noindex follow but maybe we should block them in robots txt as well.

Would the below help to solve this ?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/

Any other suggestions or direction would be appreciated to prevent these pages showing up as soft 404's

tks

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

I would recommend making sure that you block these kind of pages in your robots.txt as well in order to make sure that the bots aren't wasting their crawl budget on these kind of pages. What we included for this were the lines:

Disallow: ?s=
Disallow: /search/*

[nomad-202323]

thanks Martijn appreciate it.....any suggestion to get the "empty" search pages to 404 and not 200 if urls are entered directly?

[nomad-202323]

Hi Martijn.....I have blocked in robots.txt as you have suggested and have fetched as google bot on the soft 404.s and they are blocked. Can i go ahead and mark these as fixed or are they really only fixed if these pages return 404? I am not sure how i can return 404 on them though as they are legit search result pages.

I really just want to know the best way to deal with them in wmt now that i have blocked them in robots.

thank you