All articles tagged with #indexing
OpenAI temporarily allowed ChatGPT conversations to be discoverable via search engines through a share feature, but has since removed this experiment due to privacy concerns, highlighting the risks of unintentionally sharing personal information online.
Google's new platform Gemini inadvertently allowed public access to private chats, leading to their indexing by search engines despite the presence of a robots.txt file. The indexing was likely due to the existence of public links to the chat pages. However, the pages began dropping from search results, possibly due to their low quality and lack of relevance. This incident sheds light on how search engines index content and the limitations of robots.txt in preventing indexing.
Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool is experiencing a "failed: hostload exceeded" error, which Google attributes to spammers overloading the tool. While normal indexing is unaffected, users encountering this error are advised to wait it out and try again later. Google recommends relying on its regular crawling and indexing processes rather than manually submitting URLs. The Search Console team is investigating the issue and working to block spam attempts.
Google launched shared conversations in Google Bard without blocking them from being indexed by search engines. This led to public conversations being indexed by Google Search. Google acknowledged the issue and stated that they did not intend for these shared chats to be indexed. They are now working on blocking them from being indexed. The Bard team later blocked these conversations using robots.txt, but there is still a possibility of indexed URLs without the content being crawled.
Google Search has been caught publicly indexing shared conversational links from its conversational AI product, Bard, potentially exposing private and confidential information. Users who shared Bard conversation links with designated third parties found that the conversations were being scraped by Google's crawler and showing up publicly in search results. Google acknowledged the issue and stated that they are working on blocking shared chats from being indexed. This incident raises concerns about privacy and reflects poorly on Google's consumer AI ambitions, especially in the face of competition from rival chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Google is investigating a disruption in Google News indexing, which has caused a decrease in traffic for content publishers. The issue has been ongoing for several weeks, and Google is working to identify the root cause. The Search Relations and Search Engineering teams are collaborating to resolve the problem, and regular updates will be provided. Mitigation measures may be implemented while the investigation is ongoing.
Google has confirmed a bug with indexing content from news publishers and surfacing it in Google News, which may result in a decrease in traffic for affected publishers. The issue is being investigated, and Google is working on fixing it. Publishers who have noticed a drop in traffic from Google News in recent weeks may be impacted by this bug.
Google's "site:" operator has limitations and cannot provide a complete list of indexed pages. While it can be useful for monitoring unwanted content or finding localized versions of pages, Google Search Console offers a much more comprehensive view of indexing data and should be relied upon for diagnosing and remedying indexing issues. SEO professionals should understand and deploy the "site:" operator effectively.