The SERPs in SERPs Problem

Johannes Beus
The last few days have seen an old but nonetheless polarizing subject return to the forefront of the US-SEO-Scene: SERPs in SERPs, which are searchresults and scraped content that gets indexed by Google. And seeing how Jason Calacanis, operator of Mahalo.com who is constantly railing at SEOs, is in the crosshairs, just adds fuel to the fire.

Technically, this topic was dealt with by Google in the Quality Guidelines a long time ago, which state:

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
But as with so many things, different viewpoints and details make this such an interesting topic. Mahalo.com is calling itself “Human Search Engine” and aggregates informations from the web for a number of topics. The problem is that they – against their announcement – are not only doing this by hand, but are creating numerous pages with automatically scraped content. That should put it right in the domain of the afore mentioned guideline – sadly, Mahalo does not comply with the guideline and Google does not seem to see enough of a reason to intervene.

The situation is a little different as far as Germany is concerned, where Google is usually rather quick at intervening in such methods by cutting off their “SERP-love” for those projects: a few weeks ago, two prominent examples came up in the form of chip.de and netzwelt.de. The subdomains that contained the searchresults were not found anymore, while the rest of the pages were still ranking well.

This makes an assessment rather difficult: if you manage to balance your concept of creating semi- or fully-automated pages on the fine line that Google will still tolerate, then this can be an interesting way of grabbing a lot of traffic. Though if you overdo it or are not able to adapt the project to changing conditions, then it will be over soon – and there is no guarantee, that the main-domain will not come out of this ordeal without a scratch.
Johannes Beus - on Tue (02/23/2010) at 12:19 PM

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