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On a search results page, I want to show related search links. These links are generated by user searches, that aren't already part of the site's regular links. This, in effect was to increase the number of links on the site.

I had created a small widget that showed ten related search links. The site took a negative hit, and I'm guessing this was because on each page, ten new links would appear, and essentially creating thousands of new pages.

I want to be able to dynamically add some user-generated searches to the site without taking an SEO hit. Obviously I can no-follow those links, but that then defeats the purpose.

What's the best way to go about this?

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  • When you know you are hit by thousands of links then why you still want to keep them do follow?
    – user2434
    Sep 16, 2013 at 11:18

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Google doesn't want your site search results to appear the Google search results. Google reasons:

  • Users don't want to click from search results only to find another page of search results
  • Site search results are not high quality landing pages

According to Google's webmaster guidelines, you must prevent Google from indexing your site search results. If you don't, Google may penalize your entire site from appearing at all in the Google search index.

The easiest way to fix your problem would be to put the search results into robots.txt. You could also use a meta robots noindex tag.

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This is what canonical links are for. They'll tell Google that although the additional links keep changing that is the same page. That will stop the duplicate content issue from occurring and prevent your site from suffering low quality penalties.

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  • The results pages don't contain the same content though. They are generated from user searches, so the results will differ based on the keywords used. Is the canonical link type still pertinent?
    – ElHaix
    Sep 16, 2013 at 22:40

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