SEO STANdard Daily: Indexing Podcasts, Voice Search & Disallowed URLs on SERPs

In today’s edition of the SEO STANdard Daily we gloss over a couple of exciting news updates from Google’s Developer Conference and one important update on disallowed URLs.

1. Google to Index Podcasts

Google will now begin to index podcasts based on the content and not just the title.

The search engine will display relevant episodes of a podcast program and allow users to listen to it right from the search results.

Source: Google IO 2019

2. Voice Search

As voice search becomes more and more mainstream, Google is putting its weight behind personalized results.

This means that ranking in the standard Google SERPs will become less relevant and you’ll want to rank well for the user to grab personalized spots.

Google is also launching a system called “Picks for You” which will give personalized suggestions on recipes, podcasts, and events.

Source: TechCrunch

3. Disallowed URLs can still appear on Google SERPs

Even though Google is unable to crawl URLs that are disallowed by robots.txt, it can still display those pages in SERP with a “No information is available for this page” description.

This was confirmed by John Mueller who replied to a tweet asking about PageRank for URLs disallowed in robots.txt

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1123863570234712064

Remember that these kinds of URLs will rank only due to internal linking and backlinks since Google cannot see its on-page content.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Dileep Thekkethil

Author

Dileep Thekkethil is the Director of Marketing at Stan Ventures, where he applies over 15 years of SEO and digital marketing expertise to drive growth and authority. A former journalist with six years of experience, he combines strategic storytelling with technical know-how to help brands navigate the shift toward AI-driven search and generative engines. Dileep is a strong advocate for Google’s EEAT standards, regularly sharing real-world use cases and scenarios to demystify complex marketing trends. He is an avid gardener of tropical fruits, a motor enthusiast, and a dedicated caretaker of his pair of cockatiels.