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Daily Search Forum Recap: December 14, 2022

Published

2 years ago

December 15, 2022

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google has posted a page that documents the visual elements of the Google Search results page, which is helpful. Google also finally made a Google Status dashboard for Google Search. Google said time spent on page is not a ranking factor. Google said disallowing crawling of your site won’t lead to your pages being removed from Google Search quickly. Google said returning a 500/503 status code on your robots.txt can lead to your site being removed. And the Chanukah decorations are up at Google Search. And yes, there was a Google link spam update this afternoon – more on that tomorrow…

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

New Google Search Status Dashboard Tells Us When Crawling, Indexing Or Serving Goes Down

I always wondered why Google had status dashboards for hundreds of other products across Gmail, Drive, Google Ads, etc., but not for Google Search – its most important product/service. But that all changed today when Google launched its Google Search Status Dashboard report.

Google Gives Official Names Of Some Search Features With Visual Elements Gallery

Google has launched a new visual elements of Google Search gallery that documents some of the more popular search features in Google Search. Now we no longer have to guess or make up names for some of the Google Search features.

Google Again: Time Spent On Page Is Not A Ranking Factor

Google’s John Mueller repeated it, the time spent on a page by your users is not a factor Google uses for ranking. Time spent on the page is not a Google ranking factor, he said, “It doesn’t,” meaning Google doesn’t care about time spent on the page for ranking purposes.

Google: Disallowing Crawling Is Not A Super Fast Way To Deindex A Site

John Mueller of Google said in a post on Reddit that disallowing Googlebot to crawl your site would not immediately lead to the site being deindexed. He added that “it would take quite some time for the whole site to drop out,” and the home page may not be dropped at all.

500/503 HTTP Status Code On Robots.txt Can Remove Your Site From Google Search

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that if your server returns a 500/503 HTTP status code for an extended period of time for your robots.txt file, then Google may remove your site completely from Google Search.

Google Hanukkah Decorations Are Live For 2022

I’ve been checking for the past week, multiple times per day, and just now, Google has launched the Chanukah/Hanukkah decorations for the 2022 season. Chanukah starts this Sunday night, so I was expecting it to come soon, and it is here with a family around a table playing dreidel.

Google Chef Cooks Thanksgiving Turkey At Google

Here is a photo from Thanksgiving at one of the Google offices. A Google chef made a turkey at the Google office for some Googlers. The turkey looks amazing. I love turkey. 🦃

Other Great Search Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

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