November 2022 Newsletter
New Indexing Support Feature
Javascript-based Content Indexing Now Available!
As announced in our October newsletter, we can now index the full content of Javascript-based websites. This means agencies who take advantage of frameworks like Angular and React, which insert dynamic content into webpages, can use our in-house indexing, rather than rely on Bing results or other commercial tools. This will help you provide better, more comprehensive search results by pulling content from database-driven pages such as FAQ-management tools, or catalogs. Some of these publishing tools create complex page code that can lead to poor indexing and search experiences. Our Javascript rendering and parsing methods address this challenge to ensure clean, high quality results for the public.
By using our in-house index, you receive government-tailored relevance ranking and have control over the scope, timeliness, and content of your search results.
Take a moment to read our documentation on how we support this feature. Your domains will need to be opted-in to use this new functionality, so please contact our team at search@gsa.gov if you’d like us to start indexing your websites with rendered Javascript.
Disabling Indexing for Twitter Lists
Temporary Preventive Measure
We noticed some non-government content in our index, which had been harvested via Twitter Lists, so we’re taking steps to remove this content. We are monitoring the situation with Twitter, and have concerns about content integrity. As a temporary measure we will be disabling indexing for Twitter Lists for all search sites. If the situation stabilizes we’ll consider re-enabling this feature for the sites that had used it previously.
Not sure if your Twitter Lists were being indexed? If you checked the “Index tweets from my lists” option, we have been indexing your Twitter Lists. If you left this blank, or if your Twitter handle had been automatically detected by our system, this does not apply to you.
SEO Pro Tip
How to Improve PDF Discoverability
PDF documents are an important part of most websites’ searchable content. Please take a moment to read this new documentation our team has put together to share best practices that can significantly help your PDFs be SEO friendly.
10X Wants Your Ideas by November 30
New Round of Project Funding and Investment Priorities
GSA’s 10x announced that they’re now accepting ideas through 11:59pm on November 30th, 2022. Any federal employee is eligible to submit an idea to 10x using their submission form. They expect to finalize the list of projects that are selected for funding in early 2023, and plan to kick-off these new projects at Phase One in Spring 2023. Get more information about this opportunity.
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.