Does every page your website creates belong in Google? If you offer shareable reports, saved designs or customer-created pages, the answer deserves a deliberate decision. A page can be useful to someone with its link without being a useful destination for a stranger searching for your business.
Google updated its guidance on preventing user-generated spam on 26 October. It now explicitly covers services that publish shared pages, generated content and web apps. For organisations in Bath and the South West, the practical starting point is to check what those features publish, who can open the results and whether search visibility is intended.
What Google has changed
The Search Central changelog describes new advice about keeping link-shared content out of the index and spotting abuse through Search Console. This is an update to documentation; it does not announce a new ranking update or say every shareable page is spam.
The revised prevention guide asks services to consider whether user-created pages, generated outputs and interactive tools are intended for search discovery or direct access. For content made for sharing, collaboration or utility, it recommends noindex or a crawling block by default. It also calls for closer monitoring of unexpected page creation and search activity.
That creates a useful question for a website supplier: when someone presses “share” or generates a result, what happens next? Ask for an example using dummy information, rather than assuming the feature has the same settings as your main website pages.
Decide what each kind of page is for
A Bath design studio might offer a saved room plan; an events business might let customers share a proposed itinerary. These are examples of features to check, not reports of problems at any particular organisation. A small brochure website without user publishing or generated share pages may have little to do beyond confirming that distinction.
Separate the pages into three practical groups:
- Public information: service descriptions, useful resources or approved directory entries that you actively want people to discover.
- Link-shared material: outputs people may open directly, where appearing in search serves no useful purpose.
- Restricted information: customer or internal material that only authorised people should access.
A useful public page should not lose search visibility simply because a user helped create it. Equally, a share button should not settle your privacy decision. Record the intended audience before asking someone to change the technical settings. Our SEO work in Bath starts with the same basic consideration: which pages help the people you want to reach?
Crawling, indexing and access are different controls
Google’s recommendation needs to be read alongside its more detailed technical documentation. A robots.txt file tells compliant crawlers which addresses they may fetch. Its robots.txt guide warns that a blocked page’s address can still appear in Google when other pages link to it. A crawling block alone is therefore not a reliable way to keep a web page out of search results.
The noindex documentation explains a separate control: a page instruction or response header telling Google not to index it. Googlebot must be able to fetch the page to read that instruction. Blocking the same page in robots.txt can stop Google seeing its noindex rule. Ask your developer to check both settings together rather than adding overlapping blocks without testing.
Neither approach makes publicly accessible information confidential. Google’s content-control guidance recommends password protection for private material. If a page contains sensitive information, arrange appropriate access protection with your supplier; do not make it public just so a crawler can read noindex.
A small, useful check to arrange
Start with one representative dummy page from each relevant feature. Ask your supplier to demonstrate its access rules and search settings, and to confirm that the intended behaviour also applies to newly created pages. Keep the change limited to the relevant page type so that ordinary service and product pages remain discoverable.
For public pages using noindex, ask for a Search Console URL Inspection check of what Google can fetch and see. Removal is not immediate: Google needs to revisit the page before processing the instruction. An urgent exposure of private information needs access control and appropriate removal handling, rather than waiting for another crawl.
Finally, give someone responsibility for reviewing unexpected growth in indexed pages, impressions or unrelated queries. Google also suggests watching for unusual bursts of public page creation. Investigate an unexplained change before labelling it spam. The aim is a clear, checked publishing decision for each feature, with useful public content available and restricted information properly protected.
Sources
Google Search Central: 26 October documentation update; preventing user-generated spam; robots.txt introduction; blocking indexing with noindex; controlling what appears in Search.