Mistake: letting Google index your internal site-search results

Mistake: letting Google index your internal site-search results

Leaving /search?q= crawlable lets Google (and your own auto-linking) generate infinite low-quality result URLs from every query string. Classic index bloat — and Google has flagged indexable internal search as a quality issue for years.

Search-results SOP:
— Step 1. Owner: dev. Block /search and any query-param result route in robots.txt AND add noindex on the rendered page (belt and suspenders).
— Step 2. Owner: dev. Never auto-link to a search-result URL from a programmatic module — link to curated category/hub pages instead.
— Step 3. Owner: SEO. site: query for indexed search URLs. Gate: zero search-result URLs in the index.
— Step 4. Owner: SEO. Confirm no sitemap entry contains a query-string result URL.

Guardrail: internal search is a feature for users, never a page type for crawlers.

Ship gate: don't publish until all boxes are checked.