Blocking Dynamic Search Result Pages From Google

[drewstorys]

Hi Mozzerds,

I have a quick question that probably won't have just one solution.

Most of the pages that Moz crawled for duplicate content we're dynamic search result pages on my site. Could this be a simple fix of just blocking these pages from Google altogether? Or would Moz just crawl these pages as critical crawl errors instead of content errors?

Ultimately, I contemplated whether or not I wanted to rank for these pages but I don't think it's worth it considering I have multiple product pages that rank well. I think in my case, the best is probably to leave out these search pages since they have more of a negative impact on my site resulting in more content errors than I would like. So would blocking these pages from the Search Engines and Moz be a good idea?

Maybe a second opinion would help: what do you think I should do? Is there another way to go about this and would blocking these pages do anything to reduce the number of content errors on my site?

I appreciate any feedback! Thanks!

Andrew

[badgergravling]

Hi,

So the main issue with dynamic search results is that they won't have unique content, and will quite often duplicate other pages, as you've discovered. E.g. Products under £10, Products under £20, and Products under £30 would all include content from the first, and then the first and second categories.

The usual answer is to just noindex all of them, particularly if individual product pages are your focus and ranking well. Unless you specifically want to rank for 'x products under £10' then there's no issue with removing them from search results.

You have a couple of options for doing this - either by noindexing any dynamic search content via robots.txt, or Noindex,Follow, which still allows crawling, but won't display the results. In general, I'd say that Noindexing the dynamic search results with a wildcard is easiest and most effective.

If you did have something you wanted to rank - then it's be a case of setting a specific search result with some unique content describing that category etc.

Dan