Do multipe empty search result pages count as duplicate content?

[rayvensoft]

I am writing an online application that among other things allows the users to search through our database for results.  Pretty simply stuff.  My question is this.  When the site is starting out, there will probably be a lot of searches that will bring back empty pages since we will still be building it up.  Each page will dynamically generate the title tags, description tags, H1, H2, H3 tags - so that part will be unique - but otherwise they will be almost identical empty results pages until then.

Would Google Count all these empty result pages as duplicate content?  Anybody have any experience with this?

Thanks in advance.

[CleverPhD]

Yes.   Generally speaking, you want to leave search result pages out of the index - use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling.   Otherwise you can potentially end up with an infinite number of pages on the same topic and Google is not sure which one to rank.

You can create topic pages or main category pages and set those up so that they have pretty URLs etc, let Google spider those.  You can also scale these, as long as you can ensure they generate content, but I would not leave it open as it seems you are asking/suggesting.

[TakeshiYoung]

In general, Google does not like search results in its search results. Dynamically generating content can get you some traffic in the short term, but puts you at a big risk for Panda and other thin-quality content penalties in the longterm.

[rayvensoft]

Thanks Takeshi and CleverPhd.  This is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.  Hiding the blank pages until there is content is actually pretty easy in this system so I will just go ahead and do that.

Thanks again.