Google Updates Spam Guidance on Indexing Pages Made for Sharing
TLDR
Google's spam guidance now advises noindexing or blocking crawling of pages made for sharing, and notes that a URL blocked in robots.txt can still be indexed.
What this means for your site
- Status
- Policy change
- Platform
- Google Search
- Affects
- spam guidance, shareable pages, robots.txt blocking, noindex
- Who
- Site owners publishing pages made for sharing
- Effective
- Not specified in the source
- Action needed
- Noindex or block crawling on pages made for sharing, rather than relying on robots.txt alone.
Optimixed Overview
Optimixed's original report on this story.
Search Engine Journal reports that Google's new spam guidance recommends using noindex or blocking crawling on pages created for sharing. The article also points to Google's documentation, which states that a URL blocked in robots.txt can still be indexed.
How we got here
- Oct 26Google Updates Its User-Generated Spam Guidance to Name Tools That Publish Shared Pages, Generated Content, and Web Apps
Google has updated its Prevent user-generated spam on your site and platform help document to explicitly cover tools that let users publish shared pages, generated content, or web apps.
- Oct 21Google clarifies data-sharing controls in updated Search help documentation
Google updated its help docs to explicitly list existing data-sharing controls including robots meta tags, data-nosnippet, X-Robots-Tag, and Search generative AI controls.
- Oct 10Google ends spam update, shares crawl timing ranges in latest guidance
Google confirmed completion of its spam update and released official guidance on crawl timing ranges for site migrations and indexing.
- Aug 25Reports Indicate Google's Spam Update Focused on Mass-Generated AI Content
SEO professionals report that Google's August spam update disproportionately penalized fully automated, mass-generated AI content while sparing AI content that was manually reviewed or published by established sites.