Indexing search results

Question

Is this good for SEO? I see some sites doing it, I find their results on Google and click on them, do they do work right?

Given a site search, someone searches for:

'Peanut Salad'

The search is processed on the URL

http://www.domain.com/Search/Peanut-Salad

The results are returned, nice meta tags/titles generated, etc. The search can then appear on a list of 'popular searches' on some page on the site. These can be manually filtered to prevent spammers gaining entries on the list.

Is this worth doing? Good to get more visitors from engines? Is it useful for them?

Answer 1

I read somewhere on Google's blog (looking for link now) where they encourage webmasters to submit links to common/popular searches on their website. This would indicate to me that Google is encouraging this kind of behavior.

On the other hand, on their webmasters guidelines page they say:

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.

Somewhat contradictory.

Personally I'd submit my most popular searches as this is useful content to your users and would be to others as well.