Google Updates Spam Guide And Gives Restaurants More Control
Google has updated its spam guide and given restaurants more control over their profiles, which may impact search results and user experience. These changes aim to improve the quality of search results and provide more accurate information to users.
Original reporting · searchenginejournal.com
Original: “Spam Guide Update, Restaurant Controls & AI Mode Revenue – SEO Pulse via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern”
Read “Spam Guide Update, Restaurant Controls & AI Mode Revenue – SEO Pulse via @sejournal,…” at Search Engine Journal →
How this was written. Content Delta wrote this article with a language model from Search Engine Journal’s reporting (model: @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast); it describes that reporting rather than adding to it. The original, linked above, is the full story.
Key points from Search Engine Journal’s report
- Google has updated its spam guide to include new recommendations for indexing shareable pages.
- Restaurants can now directly control which ordering providers are displayed on their profiles.
- Google's AI Mode has lower monetization than other search modes, which may impact search growth.
- Cited pages are more likely to open with a direct answer to a question, which can improve their visibility in search results.
- Google's Performance report can provide more up-to-date information on indexing changes than the Page indexing report.
Google has made significant updates to its spam guide, which provides guidelines for preventing user-generated spam on websites. The updated guide includes new recommendations for indexing shareable pages, which are designed for direct sharing, collaboration, or utility rather than public search discovery.
The updated guide recommends that platforms apply noindex or block crawling on pages created for direct sharing by default. This can be done using a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, or by adding a crawl-block in the robots.txt file.
Google's introduction to robots.txt notes that the file is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google, and that a URL can still appear in search results even if it has been disallowed in robots.txt. A noindex rule, on the other hand, can prevent share link URLs or generated page URLs from appearing in search engine results if Googlebot can crawl and read them.
In addition to the updated spam guide, Google has also given restaurants more control over their profiles. Restaurants can now directly control which ordering providers are displayed on their profiles, allowing them to remove providers they do not use.
This change is significant because Google's policy page for ordering providers states that all partner integrations are enabled by default. Restaurants can now review their ordering list and remove any providers they do not use, which can help improve the accuracy of their profiles.
John Mueller from Google recently responded to a user's question about stale indexing data, stating that the dates on the reports are important and that indexing doesn't change quickly. Mueller advised the user to check the Performance report for indexing changes, which can provide more up-to-date information.
Google's AI Mode has also been in the news, with data showing that cited pages are more likely to open with a direct answer to a question. This suggests that pages that provide clear and concise answers to user queries are more likely to be referenced by AI models. This article is based on reporting by Search Engine Journal.
Questions and answers
What is the purpose of Google's updated spam guide?
The updated guide provides new recommendations for indexing shareable pages and aims to improve the quality of search results.
How can restaurants control which ordering providers are displayed on their profiles?
Restaurants can now directly control which ordering providers are displayed on their profiles by reviewing their ordering list and removing any providers they do not use.
What is the significance of Google's AI Mode having lower monetization?
Google's AI Mode has lower monetization than other search modes, which may impact search growth, but the company is working to expand ads in AI Mode to more countries and launch new ad formats.
