Search pages indexed

[AxelCyril]

Hi Everyone, I own a Faily large site, so, smart me thought it might be a good idea to index search pages, which lead to indexing 14k of search pages (as you can guess most are low quality), which then I would assume dropped my domain quality as a whole, since then traffic dropped 50%, so right now I'm confused what to do and what the best course of action might be.

1 - try to filter out the searches to keep the highest quality ones

2 - ditch the whole search thing (no index to all), and hope things return to what they were before

[ibb.co]

[ibb.co]

[not2easy]

Hi AxelCyril and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I'm guessing by now you know that indexing your search results pages is not a real good idea. They do not have titles or descriptions that might encourage their listings in the index, often they are subjective, producing different results using similar terms.

If you originally submitted those search pages in your sitemap you can delete and resubmit a new sitemap. I would not try to keep any search query pages as they contain other indexed pages and can confuse Google into considering them duplicate content of other indexed pages. Especially if the pages are using canonical tags such as you might apply in a WP site to prevent duplicate issues.

[tangor]

Option 2 will quickly reveal whether g will forgive (but never forget) and return some traffic. Option 1 seems like a bandaid that can lead to more trouble down the road.

Chase the USER, not g ranking! Good content is far more valuable than low quality...

Just something to consider.