Back in 2007, Google officially went on record, instructing webmasters to block their search results from being indexed by Google. Ever since then, SEOs were still looking for easy ways to generate a lot of content and landing pages outside of using search results page. Some went the tags approach and some did other things, that is until Panda wanted something tastier and moved on from consuming those pages.
That being said, the topic does not come up every day. But John Mueller from Google explained why Google doesn't like to index and serve search results pages. John said this morning on Twitter a few reasons why:
- They make infinite spaces (crawling)
- They're often low-quality pages
- They often lead to empty search results/soft-404s
There are more reasons and the list goes on and on but here is what John could fit into a tweet.
Few things: they make infinite spaces (crawling), they're often low-quality pages, often lead to empty search results/soft-404s.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) August 10, 2017
Forum discussion at Twitter.