Q: 'Google indexed thousands of our internal search result pages. How bad is it?'

Q: 'Google indexed thousands of our internal search result pages. How bad is it?'

Short answer: Bad enough to dilute crawl — one cleanup recovered crawl within a month.

The longer version: A pet supplies site found 47,000 indexed /search?q= URLs in Search Console — auto-generated when users searched. These thin, near-duplicate pages were eating crawl and a few even outranked real category pages for odd long-tail terms. The fix: Disallow: /search in robots.txt, plus noindex on the template, plus removing them from the sitemap. Index count dropped from 47k to under 800 over six weeks. Crawl requests to actual product pages rose 22%, and three categories that the search pages had been cannibalizing recovered to page one.

Rule of thumb: Internal search URLs should be noindex AND disallowed. Users find them useful; Google shouldn't see them as content.

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