One SEO-theme that is a constant companion for years is the indexing of search-results through other searchengines, SERPs in SERPs for short. For all intents and purposes this should be quite clear: Searchengines want to provide their users with their own results and not with those that were gathered by other searchengines. For this Google states in their webmaster-guidelines that:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Although something that should not be overlooked is that by indexing your own search you can generate a substantial amount of SEO-traffic with (relatively) little effort, if there is enough trust in the domain on the side of Google. There have been two events in the last few days that led me to write this post and I would like to make a short note of them.

For one we have the fact that about a week ago Google decided that the blog-searchengine Technorati.com showed too strong a presence in the Google-SERPs and counteracted this accordingly. After this we can see a considerable decrease in Technorati's visibility within Google and at the same time we can take a look at Alexa where we can see that the Google-traffic seems to have made up a significant portion of the mix of visitors to the site. Here it is quite interesting to see that even disguising the search as “tags” was not enough. In the last few weeks semanager.de showed that even “classic” open searches can be caught. Whether on their own volition or not, the Googlebot had indexed a lot of semanager.de's SERPs until someone at Google pushed the red-button and ended this, too.

The other event was the objective, balanced article nasty rant that Andreas wrote on the topic of Yasni, a “person-searchengine”. The fundamental question here is whether the aggregate results for names are generating enough added value for them to justify indexing. A fascinating topic and I am curious how Google will behave in this case. Personally I do not see enough added value in Yasni for them to warrant the massive presence they have in the Googleindex at this time. It may well be that Yasni queries many different sources but, for one, it is – to put it balefully – ultimately “scraped content” and for another it boils down to the fact that for many names they only use the source-lists on Google/Yahoo/MSN.