I have decided to play around with Google Custom Search. Now you can find pages and documents on this domain using the big “G”. Since this website is powered by WordPress, many who read this post will wonder why? Do I trust Google more? The answer to this question is yeas and no. Mos of the WordPress themes today include a “search box”. This default search in WordPress will serve your visitors the most up to date results, since there maybe some latest posts on our website that Google has not yet discovered. So why on earth would some one consider using Google?
There few reasons to consider.
It may help you to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately some of the WordPress themes are written poorly. Some times it can happen that what suppose to a “search” results can be indexed in the search engines. In fact, there is no way for a search engine to tell a regular page apart from a page produced by your on site “search function”. I am not sure if this is a common problem but it does happen.
If you have several similar websites, you can tell Google Custom Search to serve results from the all of your websites. You can even include websites that do not belong to you, but you think that your visitors would benefit from the results.
You can refine the results so your visitors after performing a search will be served with the most relevant search results.
I also think that the “native” search option of WordPress is underutilized. When you place the Google Custom Search code on your website, the text box has Google’s logo in it. Don’t forget that word google had become a verb, it is associated with search. Don’t tell me you have never said: “Let me Google this or that out”!
Many of the visitors to your website will recognize Google’s loge before recognizing anything else on your website.
I personally have chosen to serve the search results via an AJAX Search API interface, I just thought it looked really sharp. So go ahead try my new search box and let me know what do you think.
Having Google's name on your site might help with credibility. Trying it and watching your bounce rate and/or click path would be interesting. Since all the pages from either search path are dynamically generated they're not sitting around for any of the spiders to index, so there's not likely to be a duplicate content issue. That's assuming you've done the basic SEO things to your wordpress blog, like no-follow the appropriate categories and archives, and 301 the other linking structures.
Chris,
A dummy here when it comes to programing.I diid have a theme (and I believe it was theme's fault) with which I had hundreds of these urls indexed.
I just start to learn AJAX, but I had some cross browser problems, especially for IE6. Do you use any libraries, like Prototype, JQuery ..?
I just used the code provided by Google. But as can see I have removed it from my site precisely due to the problems you have mentioned. IE being the #1 issue.
You bring up an interesting point about the default search and duplicate content. I am going to have to do some research on this because I use wordpress extensively and have never given the search much thought. Thanks!!!
I just was to your website in hopes to learn your real name…. No luck, so for now I will just call you “porch lift” 😉
Anyway, the duplication you are referring to is not a huge problem. You just need to to check if the theme has any sort of “popular searches” integrated. That is the only way those urls will be indexed. See Chris' comments above on the subject.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope to learn your name one day. 😉