Google indexed 22k internal-search pages. Deindexed them, core pages rose.

Google indexed 22k internal-search pages. Deindexed them, core pages rose.

Marketplace. Internal search results at /search?q= were getting crawled and indexed — 22,000 of them. Auto-generated, thin, sometimes empty. Pure bloat.

Move:
— robots.txt disallow on /search
— noindex header on the search template for ones already indexed
— Removed any internal links that fed the crawler into search URLs (some "popular searches" widget was doing it)

6 weeks: those 22k dropped out of the index. Crawl stats showed Googlebot reallocating to product and category pages — avg crawl frequency on money pages roughly doubled.

Kill the internal links feeding it FIRST. robots.txt alone won't stop discovery if you're handing Google the URLs.