<b>Your internal search results are in Google's index right now</b>

<b>Your internal search results are in Google's index right now</b>

Bet you a coffee. Run <code>site:yoursite.com inurl:search</code> or <code>inurl:?q=</code>. Most sites have hundreds of auto-generated search result pages indexed from links and old sitemaps.

These are textbook thin/duplicate pages and they drag the whole domain's quality signal down.

Clean-up:
— <code>noindex</code> on the search results template (meta robots, in the HTML head)
— Disallow the search path in robots.txt AFTER they drop
— Strip any internal links pointing into search result URLs

Google literally calls these out in their guidelines as something to keep out of the index.

Caveat: don't robots-block first or Google can't re-crawl to see the noindex. Noindex, wait for drop, then block.