Google has confirmed today that it has fixed the indexing issue that began on Thursday night. Search Engine Land was first to report the new issue of new content not being indexed by Google.
The indexing issue. Later Google confirmed the issue on Friday morning saying “We’re looking into a new indexing issue that started escalating 6 hours ago. The issue is unrelated to yesterday’s outage and we’re working hard to resolve it. We’ll update this thread when we can provide more information.”
Fixed. Two and a half days later, Google confirmed the issue has now been resolved. It did seem Google mostly fixed the issue on Friday but Google didn’t confirm the issue to be fully fixed until today. Google said “This issue has been resolved — thanks for your patience! Wishing you all a great week.”
This issue has been resolved — thanks for your patience!
Wishing you all a great week.— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) May 26, 2019
More details. Danny Sullivan from Google told us Friday afternoon that the issue was mostly resolved but not fully resolved. “I believe it’s related to picking up fresh content because as you saw from the reports, this we’re time restricted,” Danny added. He also said this was different from the previous indexing issue, he said “but it’s a different issue that’s causing that versus the one earlier this week.”
Previous indexing issues. Google had an indexing issue with new content on May 22nd and resolved that on May 23rd. It is believes that specific issue was an issue with Google’s indexing queue being backlogged and having to clear out. It is not clear why this new issue was different.
Just last month, Google was plagued with de-indexing issues across the Google index. The Search Console reports had lost data as a result and the cache is not right. In addition, Google had an issue with selecting the right canonical URL and also had an indexing issue with Google News. It has been a tough couple of months for Google search.
Why we should care. If your site depends on getting traffic for breaking news, fresh content or needed old URLs refreshed yesterday – you were kind of out of luck. It is amazing how dependent so many sites are on Google for a traffic source. Of course, this is where you want your other traffic sources to step up, including social media, direct traffic, email, ads and more.
So make sure you diversify your traffic sources as best as you can.
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.