Not Feasible Search Cloud

[Bart]

Heya,

I've got a suggestion for a brilliant mod that should Improve SEO,
we should have a Search Cloud at the bottom of the site but just above the footer, the search
cloud should contain around ~20 words that users have used on our site to search with, for example.

If a user has search "websites" the search cloud will display the word "websites" at the bottom
in the search cloud and it should be linked to for example "http://yoursite.com/websites.html"

It should also have an admin feature which will let the owner restrict certain
keywords which they do not want to be ranking for.

Regards,
Bart

 

[Mark]

This could be a plugin (a mod for this already exists for Aardvark) but will not make the cut as a core feature.

Search clouds only link to search results pages, search results pages are not the best place to be passing pagerank, and Google does not want to be indexing a bunch of your sites search result pages. Therefore the SEO value of search clouds is very questionable IMO, these were popular a few years ago but this idea has become nearly obsolete these days for good reason. Tag cloud systems based on a category type taxonomy makes more sense, but not users search input which 95% of is generated by bots.

thanks for the suggestion though.

 

[Mark]

further reading on the topic, direct from the horses mouth
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

 

[Mark]

And from the Google Guidelines: Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769