Disallowed "Search" results with robots.txt and Sessions dropped

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi
I've started working on our website and I've found millions of "Search" URL's which I don't think should be getting crawled & indexed (e.g. .../search/?q=brown&prefn1=brand&prefv1=C.P. COMPANY|AERIN|NIKE|Vintage Playing Cards|BIALETTI|EMMA PAKE|QUILTS OF DENMARK|JOHN ATKINSON|STANCE|ISABEL MARANT ÉTOILE|AMIRI|CLOON KEEN|SAMSONITE|MCQ|DANSE LENTE|GAYNOR|EZCARAY|ARGOSY|BIANCA|CRAFTHOUSE|ETON).

I tried to disallow them on the Robots.txt file, but our Sessions dropped about 10% and our Average Position on Search Console dropped 4-5 positions over 1 week. Looks like over 50 Million URL's have been blocked, and all of them look like all of them are like the example above and aren't getting any traffic to the site.

I've allowed them again, and we're starting to recover. We've been fixing problems with getting the site crawled properly (Sitemaps weren't added correctly, products blocked from spiders on Categories pages, canonical pages being blocked from Crawlers in robots.txt) and I'm thinking Google were doing us a favour and using these pages to crawl the product pages as it was the best/only way of accessing them.

Should I be blocking these "Search" URL's, or is there a better way about going about it??? I can't see any value from these pages except Google using them to crawl the site.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Frankie,

My guess is that the traffic you were losing was because of its traffic driven by /search pages.

The questions you should be asking are:

1. Are those /search pages getting traffic?
2. Are them important to users?
3. After being disallowed, which pages were losing traffic?

As a general rule, Google doesn't want to crawl nor index internal search pages, unless they have some value to users.

On another matter, the crawlability of your product pages can be easily solved with a sitemap file. If you are worried about the size of it, remember that it can contain up to 50k URLs and you can create several sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index.
More info about that here: Split up your large sitemaps - Google Search Console Help

Hope it helps.
Best luck,
Gaston

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi Gaston

"Search/" pages were getting a small amount of traffic, and a tiny bit of revenue, but I definitely don't think they need to be indexed or are important to users. We're down in mainly "Sale" & "Brand" pages, and I've heard the Sale in general across the store isn't going well, but don't think I can go back management with that excuse

I think my sitemaps are sorted now, I've broken them down into 6 x 5,000 URL files, and all the canonical tags seem to be fine and pointing to these URL's. I am a bit concerned that URL's "blocked by robots.txt" shot up from 12M to 73M, although all the URLs Search Console are showing me look like they need to be blocked!

We've also tracking nearly 300 Keywords, and they've actually had good improvements in the same period. Finding it hard to explain it!

[effectdigital]

If you have a general site which happens to have a search facility, blocking search results is quite usual. If your site is all 'about' searching (e.g: Compare The Market, stuff like that) then the value-add of your site is how it helps people to find things. In THAT type of situation, you absolutely do NOT want to block all your search URLs

Also, don't rule out seasonality. Traffic naturally goes up and down, especially at this time of year when everyone is on holiday. How many people spend their holidays buying stuff or doing business stuff online? They're all at the beach - mate!

[GastonRiera]

If you have a site with, at least 30k URLs, looking at only 300 keywords won't reflect the general status of the whole site. If you are looking for a 10% loss in traffic, I'd start by chasing the pages that lost more traffic, then analyzing whether they lost rankings or if there are some other issues.

Another way to find where there is traffic loss is in search Console, looking at keywords that aren't in the top300. There might be a lot to analyze.

It's not a big deal having a lot of pages blocked in robots.txt when what's blocked is correctly blocked. Keep in mind that GSC will flag those pages with warnings as they were previously indexed and now are blocked. That's just how they've set up flags.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston