Changes to Search Engine Indexing?

[audra_agnelly]

Hey Canvas friends! Have there been any changes to the way web crawlers (specifically Google in our case) have access to public Canvas courses? One of my institution's public courses used to come up as the second hit when certain search terms were entered into Google, but it's no longer showing up in search results in that 2nd position or anywhere within the next several pages of results. We're curious if Canvas has changed something that is now preventing public courses from getting indexed by search engines or if something has changed on the Google side.

[greydon · Accepted solution]

Hello @audra_agnelly

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with finding your Canvas courses in Google. The short answer is that yes, Canvas' Marketing and Security teams did need to make some changes in September 2022. Many of the courses on Google searches were being marked as spam by Google. That in combination with concerns regarding privacy, there were some adjustments made regarding the search indexing. For now, if you are trying to share any public courses, it would be best to provide the URL and/or information to participants directly. We understand that this may cause an inconvenience to searching for your courses on Google (they are still there albeit further down) and we appreciate your patience and understanding while we work to make the search results comply with Google's processes.

[pgo586]

My experience is the same as that described in this post. It does not appear to be something that's specific to the public courses in question, but to the changes made by the Canvas marketing and security teams. I personally think it's really unfortunate that this happened, as many of us depend on our public Canvas content getting exposed in those searches, and wonder whether there is any update from Instructure ( @greydon  perhaps?) on their work aimed at making the search results comply with Google processes. 

[pgo586]

@calebgilk , your comment is quite vague. Could you elaborate on what factors you're thinking of? I assume you're not suggesting that the burden is not on Instructure to fix, correct?