Can you index your internal search results pages in Google in 2021?
I have extensive — both good and bad — experience working with internal search results. In general, I would describe them as having an atomic bomb in your hands, but this is true especially depending on who you are and what you do.
Seeing the statement below that John Muller from Google made in early 2020 I decided to try to get them to suggest what is the actual status of this situations, as Google doesn't generally cover a lot this topic of indexing internal search pages (I was pretty surprised that they said this in a streaming, to be honest).
“It’s extremely rare that Googlebot would submit a form.” — John Muller.
I don't need to give names for you to check on who is indexing internal search pages, as the response is *ALMOST EVERYONE*.
Almost every big website is doing that one way or the other. This is no big news as it has been a common practice to scale SEO efforts on an automated and easy way.
I found that Google does this to some of the websites I manage and this was new to me, I never found this situation before, and have managed for years some of the largest websites in many countries, it was a surprise to me.
It seems, though, that if it’s not Google but rather a website that indexes searches, it can incur into manual penalties/deindexation of that content like Pinterest, Giphy, or CNET to name a few. My main concern is that this is a bit of historical SEO, as all of them have been done years ago.
So I asked Google this and these are the three answers:
1)
As always, Google is extremely clear with their guidelines. I don't think the answers bring a lot of light, but it's always good to update their perspective on topics that have been long omitted.
I would still recommend to work on controlled internal searches indexing as usually is the fastest path to creating organic search growth, but as with everything you need to ideate it and execute it right.
