Have you ever done a search on Google, only to find that some of the results point to the search page of another site? Irritating, right? Still, don’t you wish you could do it, too? Because surely, users would want to see your site’s search pages, right? Turns out, it’s not really that hard to do.
Argh! A SERP in my SERP!
For the most part, in order for Google to index your results, you need to have it linked from somewhere. For content pages, that makes sense. However, for dynamic search results, it’s doubtful that you have links going there. So, we need to find another way to get our results into the index.
Our secret inroad will be your site’s Google Sitemap. This index of content on your site helps Google find content that might otherwise be hidden or unlinked.
Assuming that your search is GET based (instead of POST), which it really should be, it’s now only a matter of adding search URLs to your sitemap. For example, you could add the following:
http://my.site.com/search/term1 http://my.site.com/search/term2 ... http://my.site.com/search/termN
Google will extract these URLs and crawl them just like any other page.
For bonus points, you can get your users to do the hard work of generating the terms to index. Just track the terms that they are searching on in your site, then stick these in your sitemap. If there are too many, then just use the top 1,000 or 10,000 terms.
Before you know it, you’ll have thousands of search pages in Google’s index, irritating (ahem…”informing”) your fellow Internet denizens.
Note: It’s a solid theory, but I haven’t personally tried this yet, so maybe Google is smart enough to discard these results. Let me know if this works for you.
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