Google is indexing site search results pages

[marcdiks]

i have on my website a search option....it is indexing my site so people can search on keywords

now it looks like google has now searchresults from my website in there organic rankings....so for eaxample if you fill in the "keyword" in google it is not showing the page www.example.com/keyword.shtml but the page with the searchresult

does anybody know if google is indexing a site trough the search box on my site

[edited by: tedster at 2:06 am (utc) on Nov. 9, 2007]
[edit reason] specifics edited [/edit]

[malachite]

I too have a search option on my site, and for the first time this week, I noticed in my logs that Googlebot was spidering the search facility with seemingly random terms in the search string. Some of the terms it 'searched' were totally relevant to the site's content - widgets, blue widgets etc, but others were totally not related to my site - stegdiw, eulb stegdiw; words which appear nowhere on the site at all.

No idea what it's up to, and only seemed to happen for one day. Some kind of quality test perhaps?

[WiseWebDude]

Hm, I wonder if your competitor is doing a search and then posting a link to that search to mess you up? I would block, via robots.txt, the search page...say if you have search in a folder block:

Disallow: /search

This way you don't have to worry about duplicate content as well.

[Receptional Andy]

It may not be the same thing, but I've been experiencing a similar problem [webmasterworld.com]

[grant]

No doubt that one SEO technique is linking to search results pages.

For instance, go to dictionary.com, use the search, and look at the results page. Keyword in title and body copy, with similar suggestions.

I've been able to make those kinds of pages rank well for keywords.

[Robert Charlton]

WiseWebDude has it nailed with his robots.txt suggestion. Matt Cutts discussed this back in March....

Search results in search results
[mattcutts.com...]

He points to a new line in Google's quality guidelines page, intended to cover the issue....

[google.com...]

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

[londrum]

it could be coming from your users. they might search your site and bookmark the page, and that bookmark finds it way into google's search index through their use of google's toolbar.
doesn't google's toolbar monitor which pages you visit?

Here's some news about Google crawling via HTML forms:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 1:59 am (utc) on April 12, 2008]