Now, we’re supposed to stop?! Our product-search-result pages are indeed relevant for many of the queries we target.

Over and over, Matt & Vanessa vaguely said, “result pages that offer little value to the visitor” … which gives them a nice out, because it’s all based on whether or not the pages have value. I’d like to think that our internal SERPs do indeed, but as Google is the big decider, it seems as though a useful SEO tool has been taken away from me.

I see that in Matt Cutts’s post about it, there’s been no response about internal SERPs that are valuable / relevant, so we’re in this wonderful grey area.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=+site:finance.google.com+google.com+inurl:q%3D

This is a weak and shortsighted idea, Im surprised that it is coming from GOOG…

I guess when you can just plug in the equivalent to yesteryear’s “Inside Yahoo! Matches” to make money on your own SERPs, everyone else gets the hose.

What I don’t want to see in search results are search results that are irrelevant to my particular need. I don’t want to see MFA search scraper pages. I don’t want to see MFA pseudo search pages on parked domains.

But if I want to find a particular DvD model and the only way it’s been crawled/indexed for a large shopping site is through an internal search result, then give me the internal search result.

Otherwise, instead of investing their efforts in forcing people to police the Web for them (by threatening either online or behind the scenes at conferences to delist pages that don’t use REL=NOFOLLOW), Google can quickly and easily resolve this particular issue by supporting an actually useful meta tag, one that says, “Don’t return this page in results, but pick one of the sibling pages this page links to as appropriate for the query”.

Then Google can pick the most appropriate page. That is, the algorithm says that internal search page X is relevant to the query, and X points to X-1, X-2, and X-3 — let Google pick one of those three.

The solution is not to require Webmasters to do Google’s bidding under threat of penalty. The solution is for Google to remember that without the Web there is no Google.

By dint of their sheer size – and, cynics would say, AdWords spending power – the sites are able to rank higher than the *original* source of their content.

Yes, these sites do go some way to making sense of the Web for the shoppers, but what of the searcher who want to go straight to the merchant?

Shouldn’t Google show merchant results first and then a pageful of indentkit Shopping.com, Pricerunner, Shopping.com, Bizrate and Froogle results?

Is showing a screenful of near identical price comparison sites the best way of serving the user?

At the same time, all the comparison shopping engines have worked super hard to get as much of their content into the indexes as possible, so yeah, in effect its like arbitrage on a corporate scale with a shit load of link pop ensuring that they float above the merchants.

I recently had a client who was getting killed in natural search because of this and I tried to convince them that the feeds are hurting their ranking potential and they just couldn’t accept it.

Theoretically, other websites are determining which pages are the most relevant resources by linking to them, and this is already considered in Google’s algorithm.

We will be covering this in more details at Strikepoint (WebmasterRadio.FM) this evening.