Early morning on May 6, LinkedIn.com dropped out of Google Search results everywhere. With more than 690 million members, sources instantly began taking notice of the platform’s disappearance. Some chalked it up to a major SEO blunder, but what if there’s more to it?
For that short period, anyone who tried to find web pages for the www.linkedin.com domain in Google wouldn’t find any results. While some say it happened in error, others are considering alternative possibilities.
Is LinkedIn Ending Site Searches?
Many think that LinkedIn did this on purpose as a test for removing the “site:” search function, thereby disallowing people from using Google to search for results on the LinkedIn platform.
If you’re not familiar with this type of thing, here’s a simple explanation of why LinkedIn would do such a thing. Craigslist did something similar some time ago when they stopped pushing their postings out to Google and other search engines. Why? Because they didn’t want people scraping their listings.
LinkedIn may just be doing something similar, which in effect stops people from using Google to find information on LinkedIn and, as a result, forces everyone to use the LinkedIn Recruiter licensed platform to find their leads and info instead.
“This was a test run. Just watch in a few months we’ll see changes to LinkedIn” – Doug Berg
Should You Use LinkedIn Recruiter?
It’s pretty smart for LinkedIn to end “site:” searches these days since they do have a paid platform of their own up for offer that would allow them to profit from putting all of their users’ information behind a paid search wall. Of course, none of this information has been confirmed just yet.
While it’s hard to imagine that a platform as big as LinkedIn could commit such a major SEO error by accident, anything is possible, and since this is yet to be confirmed as the case, there’s no reason to start changing your recruiting methods just yet–though you should be made aware that the need for LinkedIn Recruiter may be on the horizon.
Is LinkedIn Back In Google?
The good news is, about 10 hours after people first noted that LinkedIn fell out of Google Search results, they began showing up again. Somewhere in between, John Mueller from Google shared a PSA to Twitter that may suggest it was actually done in error.
John stated: “PSA: Removing the ‘http://’ version of your site will remove all variations (http/https/www/non-www). Don’t use removal tools for canonicalization.” While it’s possible that someone at LinkedIn did just that by accident, there could be more signs of testing for potential platform changes on the way.
In the meantime, we’ll keep you updated about any news regarding LinkedIn’s plans to follow in the footsteps of similar platforms and put an end to scraping or searching outside of LinkedIn all together. Personally, I think this was just an error caused by Google search. But, in general we could see more changes to LinkedIn platform within the near future.
Tip from Ivan Stojanovic:
For those of you interested in reading what LinkedIn tells the crawlers where to go and where not to, and who can crawl and how to request the permission: https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt
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