Use Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi all

Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue.

I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too.

Thanks!

[HostColor]

I don't think that you should be looking at those from a SEO perspective. Why? If some people landed there through the search engines, this means that they have found the result in the SERP useful. This is much more important that the SEO. There are many who work for SEO, but do not manage to attract interest from those who search Google or other SE. So, keep and develop you internal search pages.

[GFD_Chris]

That's a great question. If you have pages that are generating revenue and ranking really well. I'd be hesitant to remove them from the index. Like the article mentions, Wayfair generates a huge amount of search traffic through these auto-generated internal search pages. If these are considered high quality and ranking well in Google, I would probably recommend leaving them alone.

If you want to trim some of these down, I'd use Google Analytics to find ones that aren't generating organic traffic/revenue. You could consider adding the "noindex" tag to those.

In general it is best practice to remove internal search pages from Google as they can contribute to a large amount of index bloat. However, I wouldn't reduce any that you see are performing well.

I'd be happy to take a look if you have any other questions!

[Guillaume_L]

Hi Guys,

I fell on this topic while searching a SEO friendly solution to a site I am currently building and would love to have your insights on this as it is directly related to having internal search results indexed on Google.

I am currently building an industry-specific small business directory (ex: Plumber) in Wordpress. The way I initially set it up is that when the user gets on the home page (ex: Find Plumbers in your area), they select the location they are interested in from a dropdown (ex: Miami) and the site returns a list of Plumbers that serve this location. I set up the results page as being an Archive that displays results linked to the search query, in this case, a location. The URLs of the search results look like www.company.com/plumber/?_location=Miami.

This said, I am not expecting people to find my home page on Google, but rather a specific location, which is an internal search result.

While everyone seems to agree that internal search results are not supposed to be indexed, my alternative would be to build a page for every location, which would create hundreds of new pages with duplicate content (I have a FAQ about how to select the best plumber on the same page below the results).

I also looked around and Yelp has a similar approach for the location results (ex: https://www.yelp.ca/search?cflt=plumbing&find_loc=Toronto%2C+ON)

Any thoughts on this use case?

Thanks

[Guillaume_L]

I actually found this link interesting: https://thecontentworks.uk/dynamic-pages-seo-friendly/.

It seems to me like generating dynamic content delivers a better user experience, and creates less risk of duplicate content/errors. It would be odd if Google penalized me for this.

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi Guillaume_L

I'd presume your idea is fine, looks like a good idea! As long as you keep the number of URL parameters to one or two like outlined in the article you shared, or you'll end up with millions/billions of URL's. It'll also help keep your Page Titles/Descriptions shorter if you only have 1 or 2 parameters set up. I'd suggest noindexing any pages that have more than 2 parameters chosen.

Seems like you'll be doing something similar to what AirBNB are doing, so I think you should be good to go!

[sajadf76df6t]

I also want to know how to increase the Authority of my website. I have taken the Moz course to learn the SEO to give their services. Can you guide more?