Google Says Search Query Pages Are Similar To Low Effort Category Pages

Google’s John Mueller was asked again about should you block your search results pages on your site from being indexed. The answer is generally yes, always has been, but John added that a “selected list of search-queries being essentially equivalent to low-effort category pages,” he said “but overall I’d block them.”

He was asked about this on Twitter where he also added “It’s not just indexed pages: every week I get mails from sites big & small who got spammed with queries & struggle to fix it.”

Here are the string of tweets:

Should you purposely allow indexing of internal search results pages?

— Bill Hartzer (@bhartzer) July 4, 2022

I can see a selected list of search-queries being essentially equivalent to low-effort category pages, but overall I’d block them. It’s not just indexed pages: every week I get mails from sites big & small who got spammed with queries & struggle to fix it.

— ???? johnmu.csv (personal) weighs more than 16MB ???? (@JohnMu) July 5, 2022

In some cases it might make sense to allow indexing of specific search query landing pages but in many cases, it probably does not make sense to do so.

Forum discussion at Twitter.