I realize SEO has its own jargon, but to those not immersed in the field
it is completely tautological to say a page is not indexed because "the
indexing process determines that the page is unlikely to be requested in
search." In an open-ended search, you aren't necessarily requesting a
specific page, you're only asking the search engine to point you to
pages that will hopefully be relevant to your query. It would be more
honest and straightforward for Google to say that "based on our
knowledge of what people search for, your page would appear so rarely
among the highest-ranked results that we're not going to bother
including it in our index."
--Michael Snow
On 1/19/2024 4:55 AM, npe...@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everyone,
I am Nicholas Perry, Senior Manager of Strategic Partnerships at WMF. Following
up on Jorge's previous email to add a summary of Google's recent response to
this issue, which was originally shared by Suman on this Phabricator ticket:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325607.
----
The web is really large and the search index can simply not include every single page. A
page that otherwise has no problems may not be indexed for a myriad of complex reasons,
for instance if the indexing process determines that the page is unlikely to be requested
in search. This is in line with the Search Central documentation that states:
"Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if
your page follows the Google Search Essentials."
----
Google also shared a document containing resource links, which can be found in
the Phabricator ticket. They also encouraged people to submit any questions and
attend their SEO Office Hours
(https://developers.google.com/search/help/office-hours), with the caveat that
Google might not be able to answer all questions in a given instance.
Best,
Nicholas
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