Yesterday, Facebook took a bold move and announced it’s banning Australians from sharing and viewing news and all users from sharing from and viewing Australian news pages. But one thing it added was why Google may decide to take a different step.
I see a ton, absolutely a ton, of confusion in the SEO industry around the Google launch of passage based ranking. A reminder, according to Google, passage based ranking launched in the US English results in the afternoon of February 10th PST time. But honestly, I do not see any signs of any update rolling out after that time, not until much later.
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’s John Mueller said Google may discover and index URLs it finds in form action attributes, just like it does when it finds URLs in simple text files. Again, these are not normal HTML hyperlinks but URLs listed in files.
Danny Sullivan from Google said Google is “looking at” providing a mechanism to block pages or subsections of your site from being displayed in Google Discover. This comes off the controversy that there are new manual actions for Discover and Google News but no way to control if you show in Discover.