If you have a search function on your website and it allows for publicly accessible searches to be performed, keep in mind that Google has said these search results must be dis-allowed from being crawled or your website can end up in trouble.

The policy makes sense. The search pages tend to be dribble, and are generally just machine-generated doorway pages. So if you do have a search page on your website, make sure it doesn’t get crawled.

You can:

  • Use no-follow
  • Call the search page from your form method and don’t directly link to it
  • Disallow it from robots.txt
  • All of the above

Just make sure you get it done before you get in trouble.