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IRS Website Drops Heavily in Google Search, Then Begins Recovery

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TLDR

The IRS website and other government sites experienced a significant drop in Google search visibility, likely due to overly aggressive bot-blocking that hindered indexation.

Optimixed Overview

Optimixed's original report on this story.

SERoundtable reports that the IRS website and other government domains saw steep declines in Google search rankings over several days. The outlet's analysis suggests the federal government may have deployed overly restrictive bot-blocking measures that inadvertently prevented Google's crawlers from properly indexing the sites. The IRS has since implemented corrections, and the website is gradually recovering its search visibility.

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