You don’t want your internal search results pages appearing in Google’s results – that just puts an extra barrier between your visitors and your website. They want to go straight to your page, not to a search results page where they then have to find the appropriate link (which may not be the top one). I would recommend 'noindex’ing your search results pages, as opposed to disallowing them, because that still allows Google to follow the links within them.
Yes GWT is picking up the search results in there Optimization/HRML Improvements.
So I thought about your suggestion, create a table, log all the searches, create a URL mySite.com/search-what-is-the-meaning-of-life.html. This would find all the keywords and display the relevant links and perhaps snippets of the content. I could also dynamically create a Sitemap-Searches.xml from the table entires.
A bonus would be that new pages could easily be produced, complication that the page would not be informative to anyone landing on that particular page
Whoa there! I said ‘noindex’, I specifically did not say ‘nofollow’ … the reason I gave for doing it this way rather than through robots.txt was that you can allow Googlebot to follow the links if it does find itself on an internal SERP.
It would probably be easier to use PHP to dynamically call the search phrase and make that the Title Tag. You could do the same thing for some generic META Description just to make it unique.
Any time someone lands on a page it is good, regardless of which page it is. I’d rather have my privacy policy rank for 10k keywords than never see any traffic. If you have enough searches and Google indexes these pages, you might see a nice, gradual increase in traffic.
Yes I use a PHP Framework and instead of a 404 page, route the URL to a search controller where the string is searched for an exact table title match or fall-through to searching for the all the words in the URL string. Complication arose when GWT found the results page
So rather than heed @Stevie_D;'s advice about using the noindex meta tag it would be better to have the search items relate to a unique title and unique description? Sounds good and will endeavour to modify the controller’s title and description.
Just had another thought; what would be the best Canonical link for this search: “What is the meaning of life?”
That is probably what I would personally recommend, unless you have a good reason to not want people to see the page. It will probably not outrank any of your pages that rank for other keywords, so anything it ranks for would be new traffic. You would probably want to put some call to action or some ads somewhere on the search page template just to make sure you have a good shot at converting some of the traffic on some level.
After quite a few modifications and waiting for another crawl the “Duplicate title tags” increased to 583 then down to 12 now back up again to 554
So tried simplifying the script once again to return a search result with a count and set Meta Robots = “noindex, follow” and will wait for another crawl.
The original controller was quite simple, has had numerous amendments to cater for all URL possibilities and is now a headache to maintain.
Now that the concept has proved successful a complete controller and view rewrite is imminent.
Download Time (in milliseconds): 267
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:45:50 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.13
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=70b448b533d272edff1fb8df8537bb44; path=/
Location: http://www.ProblemSite.com/Do-You-Know-Why-All-Girls-Are-Like-Apples.html
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 20
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
What more can I do? The canonical link is correct and “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” is set. Is Google reporting incorrectly showing the “Duplicate title tags”?
The correct link show “HTTP/1.1 200 OK” and the canonical link is correct.