Should I Let Google Index my Site Search Results?

[dirkules]

Hey dear SEO friends!

I have search engine friendly search result pages. Special chars are removed and spaces converted to dashes.

A result page would look like
search.example.com/los-angeles-ca/auto-repair

Since I refer to millions of objects and the many possible search result pages that would come along with it, should I have them indexed by Google? I'd have more to show to Google if I have the search results indexed, but I'm afraid my "main content" (the objects) will not rank as well if I don't "focus" on them by having much other content in form of search results.

Ofcourse a 404 header is sent if there's an empty search result set ;-)

[tedster]

No - you should not allow Google to crawl all your site search results.

The issue isn't the "friendliness" of the URL, the issue is the content on those search results pages. Many a site has tanked their traffic by exposing a large number of site search results to Google. Duplicate content galore, including a lot of "no results" pages, can swamp your good content.

Allowing these URL to be crawled can also impede efficient crawling of the core pages - by offering a nearly infinite URL space for Google to explore. If you let Google try form inputs, googlebot will often begin throwing all kinds of keywords at it.

[lucy24]

It also, ahem, absolutely infuriates some (human) users. I don't want to find a page that found some other page that found an index that named the thing I'm looking for. I want the page that has what I'm looking for. If what I'm looking for doesn't contain a word like "search" or "index", I'm not interested in your page. Sorry.

Especially when you consider that g### never forgets. Dig through all those layers and you'll find a page that was last seen in 2009.