It is now official. After dropping hints at removing the content keywords from Google Search Console; the famous search engine finally did it.
The company has just removed another attribute from the Google Search Console: the content keywords report, one of their earliest established features when it was first built.
When the tool was first launched, Google said this report was the “only way to see what Googlebot found when it crawled a website.” Presently, we already have features like Search Analytics, Fetch, and many more. The famous search engine also said that users were often confused about the keywords catalogued in content keywords, the very reason why they had to retire the feature.
This is not quite an unexpected move though, as we already heard that Google was going to remove it back in May.
Moreover, Google recently decided to drop the Sitelinks demotion feature from their Search Console. This almost nine years old feature had the ability to remove sitelinks from displaying on Google search. It allowed webmasters to hide any specific URL that they don’t want to appear in the featured sitelinks section in the search results. The sitelinks are basically the sublinks found underneath a search result snippet.
The company notated that they had to remove these things in order to keep things simple. They also said that their system had gotten so much better at creating, finding, and showing relevant sitelinks so they had to finally let go of the old ways.
Another concern would be, what would the webmasters do if they don’t want a specific URL to show up in a search result?
Google enumerated important points for this specific concern:
I. If you need to completely remove a particular page from search results, utilise a “noindex” robots meta tag on that specific page instead.
II. Let Google index important pages within your site. Utilize Fetch and Render to check that they can be rendered the right way.
III. Provide a distinct structure for your website by using relevant internal links, and anchor text that’s not only informative but compact as well; specifically, one that avoids repetition.
This is the time to accept changes and to hope that things will indeed get better in the SEO world.
