noindex or robots.txt search result pages

[Dani]

Should I be noindexing or fully blocking search result pages from my robots.txt?

[nancybruno]

Yeah, this is right. Robots.txt is a file in which you can add the pages that you don't want to show search engine bots. We can also block a website by adding noindex tag in the website.

[Dani]

Thanks but that doesn’t answer my question. How do I handle the website’s internal search result pages?

[Peleg]

I've never written a site with such result pages but I'll still take a chance and try to offer something.

If the result page exists as a template page that is filled in with the result, then I think noindexing that page would do it.

If the result page is completely created on the fly, then I don't thing there is an issue because there isn't anything for the robot to find unless it does a search itself and I don't think that happens.

I may be way off the mark here but I figured I'd take a shot at it anyway. Hope I haven't wasted too much of your time.

[Dani]

That you for your suggestion.

My question isn't whether to noindex or do nothing.

Google has already made it clear that it isn't a good user experience for their searchers to land on your search result pages, so your search result pages should not be in Google. My question is whether they should be blocked with a meta noindex tag or if they should be blocked via robots.txt.

I've done some research and concluded that robots.txt offers advantages here.

[Dani]

For those who may be curious, the reasoning is that it saves crawl budget by not having Google crawl around infinite spaces, as search results have arbitrary query strings for the terms being searched for.