Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi

I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed.

Hoping you can help with the below:

To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages?

Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time.

Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about?

Thanks!

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

Are you talking about this type page - https://www.xyz.com/search/?q=jacquemus

If yes, please do like this -

1- Add robots tag on these type pages - 
2- update robots.txt file - Disallow: /search OR /search/*
3- add new parameter in GSC as no URLs.

[Davealexander1122]

This post is deleted!

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi Rajesh

**1- Add robots tag on these type pages - **

Any reason why you'd add "nofollow" on Search pages? I'd have though "follow" is a better option?

2- update robots.txt file - Disallow: /search OR /search/*

I done this before a traffic dropped a lot over the next 2-4 weeks. We regained traffic again when we removed

3- add new parameter in GSC as no URLs.

Done already, thanks

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi Dave

I see  Amazeinvent has "noindex/follow", on your search. Did you add afterwards???

Thanks

[effectdigital]

Just a note. If you robots.txt block Google from crawling the pages, how do you expect them to find the no-index tag? They can only find the tag if they can crawl the pages! You only apply the robots.txt block (which you should do, at the end) **after **Google have removed the offending URLs from their index

If Google are robots.txt blocked, they can't crawl the pages' coding. If they can't crawl the coding, they can't find the noindex. Simple

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi effectdigital

Yep I won't be doing that! I don't think I'll be using the robots.txt file at all for this.

Thanks

Frankie