netmeg - 3:23 pm on Aug 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

I think it's probably rare, at least on the Google end.

We seem to be talking about two different things here.

There are search results pages that actually have search results on them. Arguably, it's content - it may be thin, shallow, crap content, but it's still not a blank page.

And there are search results pages (or other dynamically generated taxonomy pages, for that matter) that are blank - either the product is out of stock, or the event has expired, or it's a 'placeholder' page waiting for future content. These pages have no content.

None of them should be in the index, of course, but personally I object more to the blank pages than the others. For my event taxonomy pages, we had to write code that would slap a NOINDEX on any page after the last event expired (and also remove any ads) But that's not usually built into a CMS; you have to be able to write something custom for it.

The Google CSE results pages *should* be an easy fix if Google didn't really want them in the SERPs; they provide the code, they can recognize the signature, so they should be able to deindex them on sight. I dunno why they don't do that. Of course the cynical answer is, they have ads on them (required by Google, by the way) but I can't imagine they get enough revenue off ads on blank search results pages to make it worth the loss in quality.