{"id":12899,"date":"2026-07-31T19:58:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T11:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=12899"},"modified":"2026-07-31T19:58:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T11:58:03","slug":"google-may-treat-search-box-pages-as-a-site-quality-issue-via-sejournal-martinibuster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=12899","title":{"rendered":"Google May Treat Search Box Pages As A Site Quality Issue via @sejournal, @martinibuster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p> <div id=\"narrow-cont\"> <p>Google\u2019s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed what happens when spammers abuse website search functions to create thousands of spammy search pages. They said that Google begins to treat those pages as hacked.<\/p> <h2>Website Search Spam And Quality Issues<\/h2> <p>Virtually every website has a search function, and something that\u2019s not clearly understood is that using the search bar generates a search results page that contains the search query. What\u2019s surprising is that it\u2019s normal behavior for these web pages to generate a URL that can be used to access that search, creating a situation where a spammer can use the search bar to generate thousands of web pages containing mentions of a spammy brand, the URL, and spam-related keywords.<\/p> <p>Google\u2019s Mueller said that website search spam can become a quality issue if the spam pages can be indexed or are indexable. Mueller used the example of entering text into a search box to generate a web page that contains that spammy text, which is something that can happen.<\/p> <p><iframe class=\"sej-iframe-auto-height\" id=\"in-content-iframe\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/wp-json\/sscats\/v2\/tk\/Middle_Post_Text\"><\/iframe><\/p> <pre\/> <p><em>Mueller says search spam can become a quality issue:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cThere is one place where you could run into quality issues though with search results pages. Namely, if you let people search for things that are totally irrelevant to your website and your search results page includes those terms on those search results page and is indexable.<\/p> <p>\u2026And it\u2019s not so much that someone has hacked your website to do this because your website is doing that freely and basically saying like, oh, you search for photos, here\u2019s a photo. But because it\u2019s accessible for any search term that comes up, it\u2019s suddenly a liability. It\u2019s more like a vector for other people to spam.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p>That last bit about a search box becoming a vector for spamming is correct, if the web page allows those auto-generated pages to be indexed.<\/p> <h2>Google May Flag Internal Search Pages As Hacked<\/h2> <p>The other useful information that Mueller and Splitt shared is that they flag these kinds of spammed pages as if they are hacked, explaining that these kinds of pages can show up in Google\u2019s search results.<\/p> <p><em>Mueller explained:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cAnd we\u2019ve seen that happen that people do that at scale. They will try to recognize common CMSs that don\u2019t have their search results pages blocked and go off and link to thousands of sites with millions of pages, all with maybe some adult terms and a phone number or pharmaceuticals and a phone number or something else and a telegram address or some other kind of contact mechanism where the goal is not so much that people go to your site and kind of see your photos, but rather that in the search results they\u2019ll see for these pharmaceuticals call this number.<\/p> <p>And sometimes that does show up for these kind of queries. And when we see that happen, we might flag that as hacked. So in Search Console, you might see that as something that is flagged as hacked.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <h2>Google Can Catch Spammed Search Result Pages Algorithmically<\/h2> <p>Mueller also explained that Google can algorithmically catch these kinds of pages and block them from showing up in search results. From the site owner\u2019s side, this can feel like a win because Google handled it. Mueller cautions against assuming that the problem is taken care of.<\/p> <h2>How To Prevent Search Box Spam<\/h2> <p>Google\u2019s Mueller and Splitt recommended two approaches for preventing search spam from becoming an issue:<\/p> <ol> <li>Prevent crawling<\/li> <li>Prevent indexing<\/li> <\/ol> <h3>Prevent Crawling<\/h3> <p>The first recommendation is to use a robots.txt to prevent Google and other search engines from crawling the auto-generated search box web pages.<\/p> <p><strong>Mueller and Splitt list four reasons to block indexing with robots.txt:<\/strong><\/p> <ol> <li>Google doesn\u2019t need to crawl search pages.<\/li> <li>It prevents infinite crawling.<\/li> <li>It reduces server load.<\/li> <li>It prevents crawl budget waste.<\/li> <\/ol> <p>Regarding infinite crawling, Martin Splitt said that some implementations of search boxes can turn into an infinite \u201ccrawl space\u201d where the search box keeps autogenerating web pages through a \u201cdid you mean\u201d feature that\u2019s triggered in response to Google\u2019s crawling those search pages.<\/p> <p><em>Splitt explains:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cSo we learned a bunch of stuff about search results on websites. So they can be infinite crawl spaces because we can basically generate pages upon pages of these and maybe we even link to like, did you mean, and then we create even more that the crawler sinks into. And it sounds like they\u2019re relatively easy to get rid of with robots.txt and or no index.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p>The infinite crawl space issue is also linked to increased server load and putting stress on the website crawl budget.<\/p> <p>John Mueller explained how infinite crawling, server load, and crawl budget waste are linked:<\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cAnd all of that basically means we find, or we could potentially find an infinite number of pages on your site. And I know some people are like, wow, if I had an infinite number of pages in Google, then I would be king.<\/p> <p>But having an infinite number of pages known to Google is not a good thing because Google will try to crawl all of those pages. And you can imagine what happens when we see, I don\u2019t know, 100 million pages that are new from Martin Split will go off and try to crawl those. So that\u2019s something where then suddenly crawl budget becomes a question and your server load and your server\u2019s like, oh my gosh.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p>Those are all the reasons why Mueller and Splitt recommend using robots.txt to prevent crawling of search box pages. More precisely, they say to use as broad and general a robots.txt rule as possible that can catch all variations of auto-generated search box pages.<\/p> <h3>Noindex Directive<\/h3> <p>Mueller and Splitt mention using the robots noindex directive but say that robots.txt is both easier and the cleanest way to handle search box web pages.<\/p> <h3>Watch Episode 113 of Search Off The Record<\/h3> <p class=\"vcont\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Should you block your Search result pages?\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cfIQ_ksB61U?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p> <p>Featured Image by Shutterstock\/Tirachard Kumtanom<\/p> <\/div> <p>News,SEO#Google #Treat #Search #Box #Pages #Site #Quality #Issue #sejournal #martinibuster1785499083<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google\u2019s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed what happens when spammers abuse website search functions to create thousands of spammy search pages. They said that Google begins to treat those pages as hacked. Website Search Spam And Quality Issues Virtually every website has a search function, and something that\u2019s not clearly understood is that using [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[5613,75,8710,415,4569,738,95,80,420,9649],"class_list":["post-12899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-box","tag-google","tag-issue","tag-martinibuster","tag-pages","tag-quality","tag-search","tag-sejournal","tag-site","tag-treat"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}