Faculty can't find their books in a Google search

Using Pressbooks Publishing & Sharing Content
1

Hi all! A faculty member reached out to me about not being able to find their books, Spunti: Italiano intermedio 2 and Spunti: Italiano elementare 2, in a Google search. I confirmed both book’s visibility are set to public, the attributes are public, the settings are the same as a book that does show in Google, and both show in the Pressbooks Directory. I’m not sure what to look at next. Any ideas?

3

Greetings,

Can you please provide the URLs for these books, and let me know when they were published? If it is recent, it’s possible that the Google crawler just hasn’t indexed it yet.

Best,

Christopher

4

Hi all, I actually know the book URLs, @caitlinriedl opened a support ticket with this question: the books are https://open.muhlenberg.pub/italianointermedio2/ and Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 – Simple Book Publishing

I’m not certain when Spunti: Italiano intermedio 2 was published, it could be more recent, but Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 has an October 2018 publication date.

I noticed some related results in a Google search, like the Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 - Open Textbook Library page which links to the Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 webbook. I’m unsure why the webbook itself isn’t appearing in Google search results since it seems to have the expected visibility settings. Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated!

5

Hello Christopher and Thomas,

Thank you both for your time and help! I’m looking forward to hearing what you find.

Best regards,
Caitlin

6

I have looked into this, and I can’t find anything in the book itself that would prevent Google from indexing it. The robots meta tag has:

<meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noai, noimageai' />

which should still allow Google to crawl the site.

I can confirm that Google hasn’t indexed the site because a search for:

site:open.muhlenberg.pub/italiano-elementare-2

returns zero results.

When I search for text inside the book, I do find it in several places, including in a clone of the book here:

Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 – Simple Book Publishing

It’s possible that because the content of the original and the clone are identical or nearly identical, Google has decided to only index one and not the other.