Index or Noindex for pages with "No results"

[piernik]

On my search page I use params in url. That's why I have indexed lots of urls that I don't want to (like ?phrase=wer&page=20). Should I give to those pages "noindex,follow"?
I'm worried that lot's of pages that are not indexed (even more that 60%) could have bad impact on SEO results.

[amiromidi]

I would say:
let G keep indexing those pages with search params (like ?phrase=wer&page=20), BUT , point the canonical tag of these pages to the page one(or most important one).
for example having :
domain/search?phrase=wer&page=1 <---canonical

AND, IF, there is no result on the search page with search params, do NOT let G index it (add noindex tag)


otherwise, you are distributing the power of your pages among all of these pages. to G, even having or not having '/' at the end of a url , will make them two separate urls

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

For categories use rel=next and rel=prev but not a canonical tag. Noindex is optional.

Use canonical if the parameters are for sorting purposes only, like new to old or high price to low. On those pages where the parameters just sort the pages add a canonical to the main page people will find before any sorting is done. Don't link to the non-canonical version of a page either.

Ask yourself this question before using canonical, do I want this page to be considered a duplicate and ignored? For category pages you don't but on different sort orders of the same page you do.

I said noindex is optional because it won't affect what Google knows about the page, it will just show or not show as instructed. Adding a canonical is telling Google this page is duplicate to that page, which is useful for moving content or ignoring search order parameters but can blow up spectacularly if used just to "hide" content..

[piernik]

@amiromidi @Sgt_Kickaxe Thanks for great clues

[MrSnuts]

This is a follow-up question @Sgt_Kickaxe & everyone willing, hope it's OK to jump on this thread:

You state: "For categories use rel=next and rel=prev but not a canonical tag" - how about a canonical tag pointing at the category page itself?
I'm aware a canonical tag stating its own URL is redundant an basically stating "yes, you are on the canonical page", but would you expect that to hurt?

Since you mention next & prev, which I believe are intended to handle pagination and
ordering params (which are not part of the OPs question), I'd like to know if you'd agree the following markup makes sense:

Assume we have a page 1 "?category=A&page=1&order=newItems"
canonical : ?category=A&page=1
rel next : ?category=A&page=2&order=newItems

and then on page ?category=A&page=2&order=newItems
canonical : ?category=A&page=1 <- this is what I'm not so sure about, why not 2 on page 2 ?
rel next : ?category=A&page=3&order=newItems
rel prev : ?category=A&page=1&order=newItems

or did I get it all wrong on this? thanks for any insight, and thanks @piernik for raising a question I have been wondering about a lot, too.

p.s.
I wonder if the statement to best ignore ordering parameters in canonical is really bulletproof advice. If you have 20 items in your category, and all of them are shown on page 1, then I'd agree the order of these items is redundant to search engines, and having that page indexed multiple times in its different orders makes no sense at all.
If however your category contains 5000 items and page 1 only displays the "top 10" of your choice of ordering, then "order by price ASC" vs. "new items" will be two totally different pages and both worth to get indexed, wouldn't you agree?