Linking to Google Search Results Page for SEO

A trend I have noticed lately is people linking to a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). But why?

I have seen many high ranking sites and blogs doing this kind of linking and I am trying to understand why. Does linking to high quality sites improve your own SEO? I am under the proviso that any external linking without the nofollow attribute is passing off page rank, and also why would you pass your own pagerank to Google? Surely they have enough already.. 🙂

There are always new tricks popping up in the SEO world, and often watching your competitors and leading websites gives you some great ideas, but I am wondering if linking to a Google Search Engine Results Page really has any benefit? I find it hard to believe there is any benefit to your own site.

However maybe Google pays more attention to sites that ‘like’ Google? Many people have argued this point over time but I generally think Google treats all sites neutral in my opinion.

I am also noticing large media sites have their staff’s Google Plus user profiles in the Search Engine Results next to the page URL. Now I have followed the steps exactly as per Google recommendations to set this up for myself - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920 but I’m thinking maybe I am not special enough to get added yet. There may be some sort of approval process initially with this feature. I think there may be several SEO benefits for having a Google Plus account linked to your URL, which I will explain in a future post.

In the meantime if I come across any new information about linking to Google Search Engine Results Pages for SEO benefit I will be sure to let you know.