Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

October 2018 Newsletter

Summary

We’re celebrating the Daylight Savings Time change early by mixing up our dates and sending our October news on the 1st of November.

Service News

We’re not authorized to index secure content

We’ve had a number of requests recently for us to index content from secure test environments - password protected staging servers, etc. Our Authorization to Operate (ATO) is only for publicly-available content. We are able to index public test content for you, but nothing secure. Disappointing, for sure, but ATOs are ATOs.

What to do? There are a couple options:

  • Publish your test stack as a public “beta” subdomain, with real, or real-ish content. We could index this content and you could test the full experience.
  • Test against your production content. While it won’t be a complete test of the production experience - using a staging search box, viewing results, clicking a result and being returned to the staging site - the content would be roughly the same.

We wish we could help more with your testing needs, but we’re limited by the requirement to house only public content. Please reach out with any questions.

SEO Pro Tip

New Blog Post

We wrote up several of our recent Pro Tips into a blog post, with expanded code examples. Take a look, and also let us know what SEO questions you would like us to answer!

Release Notes

Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.

Read the Latest Notes

October 01, 2018