Canonical tag for search page

Hello Morpheus,

Thanks for reaching out regarding your search page; I assume you are referring to your internal search pages.

By default, the Yoast SEO plugin sets your internal search pages to noindex. As such, there will be no canonical URL output. You can learn more at https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-hidden-features/#search-results

Thanks for the reply, I understand yoast adds a no index attribute to the search page. But we are seeing a lot of URL spam to our search page (thousands of pages) and they Google is crawling all those pages. We are concerned this will affect our crawl budget. This is the reason we need to add a canonical to our internal search page.

Hey @morpheus83,

Adding a canonical to them wouldn’t battle with your crawl budget. Alternatively, you might want to add one or two disallow lines in your robots.txt like;

Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/

Depending on what the URLs look like.

PS: We’re aware that search spam is a problem for many websites, and we’re looking into ways that we might help users combat it.

This thread has been marked as resolved due to a lack of activity.

You’re always welcome to re-open this topic. Please read this post before opening a new request.

Thanks for understanding!