Google Ditches Rule on Internal Search Pages

Google has reversed its 2007 rule requiring publishers to block internal search pages from its crawler. The change was announced by John Mueller in a recent episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast produced by Google Search Central.

The clarification comes as part of Google's shift from its original webmaster guidelines to the modern Search Essentials framework.

Mueller explained that the requirement to block internal search pages was no longer listed in current policy documentation, but recommended it for technical reasons. He described it as an 'inefficiency' and not a spam policy violation.