Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What should i do?

[iThinkMedia]

Hello,

We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue.

We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty .

We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages.

Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages.

All thoughts or recommendations are welcome.

Thanks

[Shawn_Huber]

A couple of things come to mind:

Why don't you want the product pages to be in the index?

Why is there concern of a penalty?

As to your question:

• Are you signed into Google when you are searching? Google will show you these types of results in the SERP's, but they are not necessarily shown to customers. If you have Google desktop installed it will also show you documents on your machine in SERPs if they find them relevant to what you are looking for.

* Do the URL's have parameters? If so you can set those in GWT and inform Google what they should do when they encounter them as they crawl the site.

*Canonical the pages you don't want in the index if possible to the static pages.

[iThinkMedia]

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