Internal Search / Faceted Navigation

[mindflash]

Hi there,

I'm working on an e-learning site with the following content pages: main page, category pages, course pages, author pages, tag pages. We will also have an internal search for users to search by keyword for courses & authors & categories.

Is it still recommend to "noindex, follow" and disallow in robots.txt internal search results? Or for a site like this, is it better to use faceted navigation? It seems that faceted navigation is mostly for e-commerce sites.

What is the latest thinking on SEO best practices for internal search result pages?

[TakeshiYoung]

There's always the danger of being hit by Panda and other low quality penalties if you get too many of your internal search results indexed, but I've personally seen a significant boost in traffic by having my internal search pages indexable on many sites.  It's also a common strategy for comparison shopping sites and other similar sites.  So the answer is, it depends.  If you flesh out your search pages with keyword rich content, you could see a lift in your traffic.