Google’s approach to crawling and indexing internal search pages is generally meticulous and follows best practices to ensure that the most relevant and valuable content is captured from a website. Here’s a detailed explanation of the process:
Understanding Internal Pages: Internal search pages are generated from search functionality within a website, producing dynamic URLs based on specific search queries. These pages can often lead to content duplication or thin content issues if not handled properly.
Crawl Budget: Google allocates a specific “crawl budget” to each website, which is the number of pages Google crawlers will visit and index during a specific period. Since internal search pages can generate countless combinations, they can unnecessarily consume the crawl budget, leading to ineffective indexing of more important pages.
Robots.txt and Meta Tags: Webmasters can manage crawling and indexing of internal search pages using the robots.txt file or meta tags like noindex. By disallowing crawlers to visit search result pages in robots.txt or marking them with noindex, webmasters can prevent Google from wasting crawl budget on these often less valuable pages.
Canonicalization and Duplicate Internal search pages often lead to duplicate content because they usually aggregate snippets of existing pages. It’s advisable to use canonical tags to point to a primary version of similar content, reducing duplicate content issues and aiding Google in understanding the primary source.
Structured Data and Sitemaps: Properly formatted structured data can help Google understand page content better, but it’s more vital for providing useful context on actual page content rather than on search pages. Sitemaps should avoid including URLs that are dynamically generated from internal searches, focusing instead on important static content.
Noindex for Low-Quality Pages: If search result pages don’t provide significant standalone value or are low quality, they should be tagged with noindex to indicate that they shouldn’t be included in Google’s index.
User Experience Consideration: Pages that lead to a poor user experience or do not contribute significant value (like those overwhelming with pagination or repeating content) are less likely to be indexed.

In summary, while Google can technically crawl and index any accessible URL, it’s crucial for website owners to steer Google’s focus towards indexing valuable content through strategic use of web development tools and SEO best practices. This ensures efficient use of the crawl budget and highlights important content in search engine results.