Has anyone ever linked to a Google search?

Has anyone ever tried getting several articles on the web in various places, then promoting a link that is actually a specific google search that brings up those articles?

Just wondering if anyone else has tried this and the results they got if they did.

Seems like a total waste of time to me.

If you’re going to go to the trouble of getting links to something, why not just make it the article in question? I suppose you’re shooting for some of domain trust boost or the such but I doubt it would work.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google search pages aren’t noindex anyway.

I’m seeing a growing trend in advertisers using “Search online for…” rather than providing a website address. I’m not a fan

I’m not sure if you’re talking about the same thing, but I was thinking of a similar feature for my application. My application allows users to create cheat sheets for fantasy football. When creating sheets, people often want to view recent news stories for a particular player to see if they’ve switched teams, been demoted, ect.

My goal was to provide a link that, when clicked, would open a new window which would contain a Google News search for that player. This way the user could review the top headlines and just close the window when they’re finished and continue editing their sheet.

It is quite common. The usual reason for doing it is when someone asks a question on a forum like this when they could just as easily have looked it up themselves.

eg, someone asks “What’s the capital of France?”, the reply is http://google.com/search?q=capital+of+france

Or, if you want to be patronising, send them to “Let me Google that for you”, eg http://lmgtfy.com/?q=capital+of+france

Sometimes there may be many sites that will answer a particular question, and rather than pointing to a particular one, point people to the Google SERP and then you will have a persistent link that won’t rot.

I’ve never heard of anyone trying to target several pages across multiple sites with a single Google search - there’s too much of a risk that you’ll get the wrong results back some times (remember, Google doesn’t always give exactly the same results on the same searches). Wouldn’t it be easier to create your own index page that links out to each of the others?