In the past few days, Google Search has dropped over half of the indexed URLs from Twitter from the Google Search index. This was done after Twitter added a “feature” on Friday afternoon only to display tweets to signed-in and registered users; also, the throttling going on at Twitter right now is probably not helping. … Read more
On Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to block unregistered, signed-out users, from seeing public tweets. That meant that for Google’s normal crawling purposes, it was unable to see some of these tweets. It seems that Google now has about 52% fewer Twitter URLs in its index today than it had on Friday, just a few days … Read more
Google released spam and fraud prevention stats for Google Maps and local search. In short, Google blocked 21% more reviews, 5% more photos, 40% more videos, and 5% more fake business profiles in 2022 than they did in 2021. Google removed or blocked 115 million reviews, 200 million user-contributed photos, 7 million user-contributed videos and … Read more
Older than most of the search engines we use today, the robots.txt file is a dinosaur of the web. Although there are many articles discussing the protocol and how to use the file, in this post we will cover some ambiguities, corner cases and other undocumented scenarios. Why should you care? The robots.txt is a … Read more
Google has released its annual ads safety report, which showed that Google removed 53% more ads this year and in the previous year and 67% increase from two years ago. Google removed over 5.2 billion ads, restricted over 4.3 billion ads and suspended over 6.7 million advertiser accounts in 2022. I like to compare these … Read more
If you are confused when Google reports redirects as other categories, like “blocked by robots.txt”, “soft 404s”, “noindexed”, “404s”, and others, it could be Google silently following the redirect and reporting the status of the true destination url instead. My post covers the situation in detail, and provides examples of this happening in the wild. … Read more
421
229
714
826
543