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

If a URL is disallowed for crawling in the robots.txt, it can still "collect" links, since it can be shown in Search as well (without its content though).

— Hey John, Your profile caught my eye. Ouch. (@JohnMu) May 2, 2019

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