In the latest Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller from Google said that it is no longer in the Google Guidelines, now Google Search Essentials, that you must block Google from accessing your internal search results pages. He added that you likely should continue to do so because it can lead to (a) intense server load and (b) quality issues if abused, which can cause Google search ranking issues as a result.
John Mueller told Martin Splitt of Google, “back in the early days in our webmaster guidelines, when they existed as Webmaster Guidelines, I think we also listed search results pages as something that you have to block from Google.” “And we listed it, I think, either as automatically generated content or something like these infinite spaces type things, because theoretically, it’s an automatically generated content. It’s also infinite space,” he added. He said, “And we recommended blocking those pages in the webmaster guidelines.”
But now, no. “Nowadays, we don’t have that listed in the search policies, but it’s still something that I think just purely for technical reasons makes sense. So it’s not necessarily something where we would say, “We think your site is spam if you allow your search results pages to be indexed. ” It’s just like, you’re being very inefficient,” he added.
But it is not just being inefficient and cause a slow down on your server, which may also impact how fast Google crawls the rest of your site. He said it can cause some quality issues if hackers gain access.
“There is one place where you could run into quality issues,” John added later. He said, “if you let people search for things that are totally irrelevant to your website, and your search results page includes those terms on those search results page and is indexable.”
These can create URLs on your site, that are irrelevant to your site, even show adult landing pages with spam information. That can result in Google labeling your site as hacked and your site might see a downgrade in rankings during that hack.
John said, “But you could imagine casinos, pharmaceuticals, any kind of restricted content, any adult-related content. It could be suddenly like all of these long adult terms and then a phone number and then photos in the end. And your website basically has a page for these terms now with that phone number. Then suddenly your pages are showing up in search for these problematic queries. And it’s not so much that someone has hacked your website to do this, because your website is doing that freely.”
“And when we see that happen, we might flag that as hacked. So in Search Console, you might see that as something that is flagged as hacked,” he added.
So, for those two reasons, it is probably best you block Google from accessing your internal search results pages.
In 2007, Google added to its guidelines to block internal search results pages from Google Search. But like I said above, it is no longer in the documentation specifically anymore. Google still recommends you block them but for many reasons, like it watering your site down, potentially leading to low quality pages and soft 404 pages. It is also part of Google’s advice on preventing spam on your site.
So, no, this is not a new topic, we covered it here countless times – just use my search box to find those articles. 🙂
Here is the video embed that started at the 17:10 mark:
Forum discussion at YouTube.
