Google: It Would Be Rare for a Ranking Improvement After Removing Tag/Search Pages from Index
https://www.seroundtable.comThis is a weird one. According to Google’s John Mueller in most cases rankings will NOT improve if you cut your tag/search pages from the index. In the past, I have had success with this where we cut a lot of low-quality pages a lot of which had near-duplicates on the site(with 301 redirects and such in place, not blindly deleting). In this case, perhaps John was referring to tag/search pages on a WordPress site those are not near-duplicates and just axing those will have no impact on your rankings.
Generally speaking, you don’t want near duplicates to exist in the first place but if you do then axing those pages is something I still recommend. Thoughts?
