Jay Julian Payne
Jay Julian Payne

Reputation: 780

Adding Search Links to Google Sitemaps

Our CMS has tags-system URLs like this: .../articles/category?tag=186

Not SEO-friendly...

Rather than hack those into SEO-friendly URLs (/tag/politics/) ...

I had an idea:

1) disallow: /articles/category? (robots.txt)

2) add search URLs to our sitemap:

.../search?query=politics [which is almost the same as tag=politics]

I'm not asking about parameters (query=politics) in the URL, I know that's not ideal.

But apart from that, is this a good idea?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 180

Answers (1)

Bob C
Bob C

Reputation: 509

I wouldn't recommend adding search URLs to a sitemap; you're opening up a Pandora's Box of low value and duplicate content. I've seen this happen multiple times before on a variety of sites. G explicitly recommends you only add clean, complete (i.e. not variable/dynamic search/filter results) to your sitemap.

If the G spiders see that form of URL being explicitly asked to be indexed they might start indexing shedloads of them that you didn't initially want, which will make your problems worse, not better.

You'd honestly be better off hacking the URLs into shape with a bit of mod_rewrite and httpd.conf work (if you're using Apache), even though it's more effort at the initial stage.

Upvotes: 1

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