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Google Has Stopped Indexing Pages That Need or Use Cookies

[ Back to News Page ] Dated: 18-Sep-2018

This might not be breaking new to the SEO and digital marketing community as Google has been rambling about this for a long time. However, recently Google’s very own John Muller stated on his Twitter feed that Google almost certainly cannot index a page that needs cookies. According to his Twitter statement, if you want your page indexed by Google, make sure to “remove dependency on cookies”.

This will affect a lot of digital marketing techniques that have been used in the past. In another statement, John Muller said that Google crawls the stateless web. He added, Google is able to detect if cookies are need on a page although they cannot index it.

In reference to customizing page content that is based on cookies, John also said on Reddit “While Googlebot generally doesn’t keep cookies, it may sometimes use them”. This is different to indexing however and is on a completely different plane of existence.

The main point to be noted with this major Google news is that digital marketers may have to change their ways. The traditional ways where information was generated by user’s way of using any given webpage or spending time on the internet, any websites or pages that makes use of these cookies or are dependent on them, might end up not getting indexed at all.

After this update, there is just no point going with cookies on your page or website. You might be able to gain useful information but will have no base to use it on. Like in John’s statement, be sure to remove cookie dependency if you wish for your page to be indexed and be open for business.