search engine bots

[dps1]

Folks,

I noticed of late that search engine bots like googlebot are ploughing in via my search.cgi. Normally, I would think this is a great thing, but the search terms used (and consquently indexed on their search results pages) have absolutely nothing to do with the content I provide. This is nothing more than search engine spam & I fear Google and other search engines may ban our sites. I suspect this is because someone somewhere is aggregating OpenSearch results from my cgi & is not properly constructing their results pages to exclude providers that didn't return results from such searches. I would recommend that folks use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> in their search templates. Granted OpenSearch is rather new, but is there anything we can do to help prevent ourselves from losing rank on Google (or worse, being banned) as a result of someone poorly aggregating OpenSearch feeds?

Dave

[David]

Googlebot won't be making up search words to feed into your search engine, so I think you are right. It is probably someone else (a human not a bot) linking to your site's search results. This might be via Opensearch but it could just be normal links. You could try using the Google 'back links' to see which external site the link came from. If you could find the person responsible you could try and contact them.

So you could use robots.txt or the robots meta tag, as in your post, to block indexing if you were concerned.