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This page on my website (Arabic) contain Verses of Quran. Every word of the verse is linked to the search page to perform a search for this word in the Quran. (the first four words are highlighted by red circles in the attached screenshot).

Does making the contents of the page, as described above, negatively affects the pagerank or the indexing of the page's contents in Google?

enter image description here

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Hi, please could you edit your question and make it more defined. At the moment you say all words are linked to a search but then you have 4 circles? What about the circles... – bybe♦ Jan 29 at 21:35
The circles are just there to indicate a few single-word links as examples, since everything is linked and it'd be easy to misinterpret as a single massive one. – Su' Jan 29 at 22:10

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Yes, there are big SEO problems with this.

The first is that Googlebot is going to see each of those search links as pages. It will crawl every one of them. It will not be happy with what it finds. It will find those pages to be low quality. If somebody from Google does a manual review on your site, they may even penalize your site for allowing your search pages to be indexed. It is against Google's webmaster guidelines to allow search pages to be indexed. They may test this by putting in irrelevant keywords such as XXX words or pharmacy spam (viagra) keywords into your search engine. When they see you have a page for them, they will kick your site out of the Google index. To avoid this problem add a line to robots.txt: disallow: /search/

The second problem is one of pagerank. You have a LOT of links in each page and most of them are of no use to a search engine. Googlebot is going to have trouble assigning pagerank to the page that you want to have crawled because you have so many other links. I would suggest that your words don't need to be links to get the behavior you want. You could make each a span with an onclick event that uses innerHTML to get the text, and a javascript function to send the user to the correct search page. Then you wouldn't have all the extra links in the page and Googlebot would have a lot less to sift through.

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I'm no expert, but I think it can be expected words like Viagra aren't mentioned in Quran. – TildalWave Jan 30 at 1:37
It doesn't matter if the site itself links to it. Google reviewers are known to test with these keywords. There was a case in which a site that had filler items for amazon was penalized like this. It didn't link to the viagra search, but the google reviewer put it in. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 30 at 1:45
TildalWave ROFL.. – bybe♦ Jan 30 at 1:55
You could perhaps return a 404 status code for search pages that return no results? (Or inject a noindex meta tag?) – w3d Jan 30 at 8:43
Returning a 404 for no results would make the situation better, but not perfect. Google still doesn't want search results in its search, it considers them to be low quality. The noindex tag would prevent a penalty just as well as robots.txt. The biggest difference would be that googlebot would have to crawl each page to find the tag, as opposed to robots.txt which prohibits crawling. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jan 30 at 14:48
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Generally for SEO purposes its best to link keywords or keyword phrases, the problem your find is that you are creating hundreds of pages that are considered THIN. Now you could make the searches meta="noindex, follow" and block /search/ in the robots file - which will help to a certain degree but your have some juice passing to these pages, and I do no recommend using nofollow on the links themselves as this can be damaging. Read up META noindex, follow, this basically means these won't show up in search results.

Ulimately you are best only anchoring keyword phrases to link to other articles rather than a search, or search but personally article to article for SEO works best this way your also helping out your visitors.

Google loves sites that CITE stuff, so if for example your talking about APPLES you can link to other articles like "chocolate apples" "chunky apples" - linking everything is not only silly but doesn't help. Since liking to things that isnt' really about the page doesnt help your authority.

It's also good to link out to other references towards the topic your talking about, adding further authority.

But Arabic is not my lang so its hard to say other than what you say about the page.

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"linking everything is not only silly but doesn't help" - I imagine this is a service for users, not an attempt to boost rankings. It is quite common for dictionaries and other reference material to link every word in the definition, take reference.com for example. However, reference.com uses clickable-spans to link all the common words, only using anchors for keywords - maybe that's the way to go? – w3d Jan 30 at 8:35
Well ya but Reference and Wikipedia only link when its reference to another article. I mean ya you could do the whole dictionary but then he'd become an authority on the Arabic Dictonary and not of the Qur'an. – bybe♦ Jan 30 at 23:54

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