Is this going to shoot people and my clients in the foot?

[LesleyPaone]

I have mentioned before about rewriting search URLs to look like landing pages, in e-commerce sites. Is this going to be a bad practice to use on a wide scale?

I took the time to make a module for the platform I develop on which is going to make it easier to do. Normally a search would look something like shop.com/search_controller?search_term=searchword  and the search pages are disallowed in the robots.txt file.

But the module I made lets you configure them to be like site.com/searchword or what ever you want it to be. It also lets you configure the meta title and the meta description of the page too. Here is a screenshot of the options.

http://screencast.com/t/PwhBfSia5k

The module also appends the urls to the site map of the site too. Will this get people a penalty by google? Or will it get their pages indexed? I have done similar on a small scale of like 5 words per site, I am wondering how it will be seen on a large scale.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Looks good.

[LesleyPaone]

Correct, here is an example, this is a search how it is normally generated, http://admedonline.com/index.php?controller=search&controller=search&orderby=position&orderway=desc&search_query=tape

It uses no meta tags really and has an ugly url that is not great for indexing. Plus I disallow the search in the robots.

Here is one of the searches that I rewrote, I have cheesy meta tags just to test it, but it has a better url.

http://admedonline.com/medihoney

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Lesley,

That sounds fine.  I was thinking of these general site search pages I keep coming across, where someone stuck Google site search or something onto their site and then Google returns one of those pages.  Often times there's nothing even relevant in the search.  The big thing for me is that I want to find what I was looking for when I click through a search result.  I don' want to find another search results page.  That said, if the results page is a list of products that I'm searching for, then I've found what I'm looking for.

Based on your last description, it sounds fine to me and I don't think it would be considered poor quality.  It's basically just a category page and I always recommend to ecommerce clients that they optimize their category pages.

Sounds good.

Kurt

[LesleyPaone]

See my strategy is not to provide poor results, but more targeted results. How I normally use it is like this, say you have a site selling laptops. You would put them into categories like amd, intel, then screen size, maybe processor speed and ram. But what happens when someone searches "red laptop" or "beats by dre laptop" having a search page come up with all of the appropriate laptops is not a bad thing. I don't recommend people over categorizing, so I see this is a way around it.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

It's hard to know how Google will respond, but I can tell you that I find search results pages in the search results all the time.  Personally, I can't stand it.

The two factors that I think will play into whether Google does something about this is:

1. Will they think these pages are poor results?
2. Will search results pages in Google results become a widespread enough issue that they take the time to deal with it?

I guess one more question to ask would be whether, if they do address it, whether they would penalize sites or just remove the pages from the search results.

My guess is that they probably would find most of these pages to be poor quality results.  I don't know if they'll get around to doing anything about it, but if they did, I think they would just remove the pages from the results, not penalize people.

That's my $0.02.

Personally, I hope this doesn't become widespread because I really don't like site search pages in the Google results.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com