Daily Search Forum Recap: March 1, 2021

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 launched a new link spam algorithm update, reminded us about the nofollow attributes and warned us to use them…

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.

Gary Illyes posted a new blog post on the Google Search Central site asking all of you to stop using 403 and 404 server status codes to reduce the crawl rate of Googlebot. He said they have seen an uptick in the number of sites and CDNs doing this and they need to cut it out.