March 29, 2008

Mystery: Google indexing site searches

by Brian Turner

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Google appears to be indexing keyword searches on Wordpress installs without any normal cue being given. Are we looking at an indexing error, or is the data coming from Google Analytics?

Was searching through one of my sites on Google last night - Wordpress driven and running GA -
when I found a whole load of keyword searches had been indexed.

Certainly wasn’t doing this myself - the pages aren’t optimised for the keyword searches.

Other Wordpress users have noticed this as well, and Brian Chappell has blamed Google Analytics as the cause.

Of course, there are other possible reasons, but the GA suggestion is certainly interesting - it would make sense if Google was indexing human user searches and GA would be a simple way G would get the info on the URLs.

However, the actual keyword searches so far appear to be just single keywords rather than normal search strings - so they don’t look human user driven.

Additionally, Matt Cutts has commented that this is happening on sites that aren’t running Google Analytics.

So it looks like Google’s indexing process is accidentally auto-generating and indexing site searches - or else there is a feature in Wordpress that accidentally allows site searches to be recorded and indexed some how.

At present there appears to be no definitive answer, so we’ll certainly watch this with interest, and see whether it’s just a Wordpress issue, or whether other publishing platforms can be affected.

Discuss this in the Internet Business forums

Story link: Mystery: Google indexing site searches

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