Google: Best To Not Have Sponsored Products In Category Pages Indexed

Sep 27, 2021 - 7:11 am 0 by

Google Times Square Ads

I asked John Mueller of Google about category pages that contain sponsored products. Does Google want sites to ensure Google cannot index those sponsored products. John Mueller said "some sites take care to prevent them from being indexed in various ways, which is probably a good practice."

He didn't go as far to say that it is part of Google's webmaster guidelines and that is something Google frowns upon. He just said it "is probably a good practice" to make sure Google does not discover those sponsored products on those pages.

Here is the example I provided, of course I used cheese:

Google Seo Sponsored Products Cats

My question was "I had an interesting question asked about category pages that list products as sponsored. A lot of e-comm sites do this. Does Google treat the products labeled as sponsored differently just because they have a sponsored label on the UI?"

John responded "These are essentially just ads -- like you might have on any site. Some sites take care to prevent them from being indexed in various ways, which is probably a good practice. Eg, AFAIK Adsense is blocked by robots.txt."

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Bit more on this:

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 1, 2025

Jul 1, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google June 2025 Core Update Is Rolling Out - What We're Seeing So Far

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Search Console Insights Report

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:41 am
Spiders

Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Who Ate The Bing Search Results

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google AdSense

Google AdSense New Privacy Law & Opt-Out Mechanism

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google's 23rd Birthday Logo - Happy Birthday Google