October 2021 Newsletter
You Spoke, We Listened
New Improvements to Come with Additional Resources
We are very excited to share that our program has received additional resources to begin work on several long-awaited improvements, including:
- A new USWDS-based results page interface
- Faceted search
- Index Coverage Enhancements
- More finely-grained user permissions, which will improve security and allow more individuals in your organization to be involved in site search management
We’ll also be requesting additional resources to improve our relevance ranking, such as site-specific controls for boosting and demotion, improved synonym handling, and more.
We will keep you updated as we move forward with each of these improvements. We look forward to sharing our progress with you, and as usual, getting your valuable feedback.
SEO Pro Tip
How to Keep Your Test Content Out of Search Results
As a best practice, we recommend that you block your test content from search results by posting it with a robots noindex tag. This practice will keep it out of search results, both for Search.gov and commercial engines. You can use either a meta tag in the head of the page itself, or an X-robots header.
You can find more information on our article How to get search engines to index the right content for better discoverability. Please refer to the section titled Robots meta tags.
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.