Google has up to date its favicon search developer documentation to take away the part for the Google Favicon consumer agent and to make clear that in order for you Google to indicate your favicon it’s essential to enable each Googlebot-Picture and Googlebot to crawl your pages.
Here’s what modified within the favicon documentation – you may also examine your self with an older copy.
(1) Google eliminated the Google Favicon consumer agent part which reads:
Google Favicon is the consumer agent for downloading favicons outlined by web sites. It’s a low-volume crawler: it might go to the house web page of your web site sometimes based mostly on indicators gathered throughout indexing, or triggered by a consumer request. To request that the Google Favicon consumer agent crawl your web page, you possibly can request indexing of your web site’s house web page. Updates can take a number of days or longer to look in search outcomes.
Here’s a screenshot:
Google stated, it “eliminated details about the Google Favicon HTTP user-agent string all through our documentation, as that is now not used. The removing of the HTTP user-agent string means no modifications for web site homeowners. Google Favicon relied on the Googlebot-Picture and Googlebot robots.txt consumer agent tokens, which stay supported.”
(2) Googlebot-Picture and Googlebot have to be allowed to crawl for Google to indicate your favicon in search. Google stated it “clarified within the favicon documentation that each the favicon file and the house web page of the location have to be allowed for crawling by Googlebot-Picture and Googlebot respectively.”
The doc now says, “The favicon file have to be crawlable by Googlebot-Picture and the house web page by Googlebot; they can’t be blocked for crawling.”
Beforehand it stated, “Each the favicon file and the house web page have to be crawlable by Google (that’s, they can’t be blocked to Google).”
Discussion board dialogue at X.
