Make Searches on Your Wordpress Indexable
You have probably met some of the spam sites that replicate google searches for lots and lots of google indexed pages. Believe me, they do receive a lot of hits, because pages they serve are very relevant. Indexing searches is a known for good amount of time, but what we are going to do is we will make google index our site-wide searches not google search engine result pages (serps). And at the end, we will be generating a lot of traffic from google.
First we need to download the Search Meter Wordpress Plugin. It basically keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After installing it, you can show the latest or most popular searches on your sidebar using:
- <?php sm_list_recent_searches(’ ‘,’ ‘,’10′) ?>
- <?php sm_list_popular_searches(’ ‘,’ ‘,’10′) ?>
The first and second empty brackets represent what you want to place in front of and after every search term (html code like <li> and </li>) The number at the end is the number of results you want your visitors to see.
Now we need to edit it:
On line 101 and 120 of the plugin file, replace
<a href=”‘. get_settings(’home’) . ‘/search/’ . urlencode($result->terms) . ‘”>
with
<a href=”‘. get_settings(’home’) . ‘/search/’ . urlencode($result->terms) . ‘.html”>
this will show your searches as html documents, and I don’t have to say how much Google loves html documents, do I?
Now, the plugin will list the searches as html documents, but they will return 404 errors since we have not yet configured Wordpress internal files. The .htaccess rewrite attributes are written in a file called rewrite.php inside your wordpress/wp-includes/ folder. Open that file and go to line 408, and replace
$this->search_structure = $this->root . $this->search_base . ‘/%search%’;
with
$this->search_structure = $this->root . $this->search_base . ‘/%search%.html’;
This will prevent Wordpress from returning 404 errors. Now wait for google to crawl through your searches. You will be amazed at how much traffic your wordpress searches can bring. There are also other possibilities that I won’t get into, but I hope you like it.
PS: this will never get you banned or put you in google sandbox. Overall, this is acceptable according to Google Guidelines.
enjoy the traffic!
