URL: Internal Search

URLs that might be part of the websites internal search function.

Google and other search engines recommend blocking internal search pages from being crawled to limit sometimes duplicate and low quality pages from being crawled and indexed.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the URL tab and ‘Internal Search’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button. Use the lower ‘Inlinks’ tab to view pages that link to them.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when a URL appears to be part of the website’s internal search function. For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/search?q=example

How To Fix

Most internal site searches are built for users, rather than search engines who may needlessly crawl and index them.

As best practise most search sections of a site should not be linked to internally, and should be disallowed in robots.txt.

Popular search pages could be built into real pages to help improve organic traffic.