Site Search external hosted pages - Penguin

[MarzVentures]

Hi All,

On the site www.myworkwear.co.uk we have a an externally hosted site search that also creates separately hosted pages of popular searches which rank in Google and create traffic. An example of this is listed below:

Google Search:  blue work trousers (appears on front page of Google)

Site Champion Page: http://workwear.myworkwear.co.uk/workwear/Navy%20Blue%20Work%20Trousers

Nearest Category page: http://www.myworkwear.co.uk/category/Mens-Work-Trousers-936.htm

Could this be a penalisation or duplication factor? Could these be interpreted as a dodgy link factor?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind Regards,

Andy Southall

[MichaelC-15022]

Andy, I think I would be somewhat concerned about this on two levels.  First, the duplicate content level--Google may see the content on the site search site as the original, and decide that much of your main site is unoriginal content, and thus hurt your rankings for your main site.  Second, this is going to generate a crapload of links to your site from one other site, and so you're running a risk of having a problem with Penguin like this.

Having said all that, this should only be a problem if there are LINKS somewhere to the search results on the other site.  Google itself won't execute a search form.

I'll recommend Google's CSE (custom search engine) as a replacement. It puts all the search results on your own site, it's pretty inexpensive, and simple to set up.  And very easy to configure to look like the rest of your website.  To see an example, try the search on my site http://www.visualitineraries.com.