SEO GSC Performance Review: Indexing & Canonical Issues
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Alex Cloggie
We have experienced some within GSC whereby Google is not respecting the canonical. So we would like to add a noindex tag to all of the user-generated search pages to help resolve this issue. There also appears to be a disparity between a number of pages indexed where are not being included in the sitemap and we attribute this to the issue mentioned above. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks, Alex.
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Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
I've written the code for this, I'm checking with our SEO people that there is no drawback to this, but here is an example of the results.
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Shirin Sadr
Might this be related to the issue previously raised about the canonical not being in the <head>? https://citruslime.canny.io/ecommerce-website/p/seo-canonical-tag-sits-in-body-move-to-head
This says this was completed at the time, but looking at mine also, it seems to have moved back into the <body> (having said that I cant recall ever checking that it was indeed moved to <head>) My GSC too is not identifying my user-declared canonical.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
I need more information to understand the issue, can you provide me with some example links. We both have our own inhouse SEO people (this is a paid service) and have worked with lots of agencies over the years and I don't recognise the problem you describe, which is likely because I don't understand it properly.
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Alex Cloggie
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Thanks for getting back to me.
Here are some example links: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N4enSXpGsA_LurnsQrWwTMe_OPNWcESE-iMblSiEaHI/edit?usp=sharing
Let me know if you need more information.
Thanks!
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Alex Cloggie Ah are you saying you don't want any of the 'free text' searches to be indexable? For example the Url produced when you type in the search box below. For context that screenshot is from https://www.workingclassheroes.co.uk/
We've had loads of agencies and indeed we have our own in SEO experts and they've not flagged this, but I can see why that might undesirable if lots of pages get indexed in this manner. My hunch is that there are internal/external links to search terms and therefore Google thinks they have value.
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Alex Cloggie
Hi Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime, apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I have discussed this with the wider team and below we have provided our rationale behind the request:
The rationale behind our suggestion is to add an imperative to search engines not to crawl or index the search pages, as these are user generated and can take up a large amount of crawl budget. Also, as users can enter whatever they want in the search box, these pages can be of a very low quality, and there are security implications where malicious actors can hack search functions to build spammy backlinks.
At present all pages generated by the search function are canonicalised (canonicalisation also dissuades crawling) back to the base URL of the site, which is good practice. However canonicals are a directive, not an imperative, and search engines can ignore them if they want to.
Adding a noindex tag to pages generated to the search function will add a directive that search engines cannot ignore, thus allowing for a more effective spend of the crawl budget focused around the important bits of the site we want to drive traffic.
I hope this clarifies things.
Thanks,
Alex
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Alex Cloggie To confirm looking at the source code here on a free text search you are suggesting that despite the canonical pointing to the homepage we ought to add a noindex tag to 100% ensure free text search results do not end up in the Google natural search rankings?
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Isabelle Wheatley
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Hiya Neil,
My name is Isabelle, I've taken over this account since Alex left.
I'm not sure if this was ever resolved as I'm trying to work through our previous requests. To answer the above, yes that was almost what Alex was suggesting. While those pages won't necessarily be ranking on Google as they're not optimised for SEO, this is more Tech SEO stuff. Google crawls the site and unless a page is given a no-index tag, it may decide to still crawl certain pages (which alex said above) if it wants to - this uses up crawl budget for our client, and it is best practice to add these no-index tags to the search results pages mentioned, as well as some other types of pages.
You can also disallow these pages in the robots.txt file to prevent google from crawling them if this is easier?
I look forwards to hearing back from you.
Thanks, Isabelle