Google de-indexing issue now fully resolved

Google announced Wednesday night that the de-indexing issue that started last Thursday is now fully resolved.

Google’s statement. Google said, “The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.”

Here is the tweet:

More details. Google dropped pages inadvertently from its search index due starting on Thursday, April 4. On Saturday, Google said it had fixed the issue, only to say a day later that it was not fully resolved.

In a series of updates throughout the week, Google said it as still reprocessing pages and expected the issue to be fully resolved soon.

Why it matters. You may see a loss in traffic, a loss in revenues, sales, conversion and overall metrics during this period from Google search if you had pages drop out of the index.

It’s not clear what caused the issue (Google’s not saying) or how much of the index was affected. We just know it was substantial and took days to rectify. This episode did show that the Inspect URL and Submit to index feature in Google Search Console’s worked for those who resubmitted dropped URLs to the index.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.