How do Google Site Search pages rank

[EdwardUpton61]

We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines.  So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword,  and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages.

My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently?

My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links.  However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.

[DavidKauzlaric]

I would recommend linking to static pages, not dynamically generated pages if you can help it. From my perspective, /biology/ is going to be much better for SEO purposes than /search?q=keyword. Even the SEOmoz Crawler has a metric for overly dynamic URLs/Links and I think Google would much prefer a cleaner link.

Just my 2 cents.

[KeriMorgret]

I agree with what David said. Also, Google says they do not want to index search results in their search results.

I'm unclear how this would be implemented, but you do also want to think of what is a useful results page for your searchers, and will a q=keyword result provide a better or worse results than /biology. I worked for a site that included (among other things) lesson plans. There was one for physics that didn't require calculus. If you did just a keyword query for calculus, you would get the result for that physics plan, as the description included the word calculus.