Google confirms it is currently experiencing issues with its search results index.
Google published a PSA advising site owners that it is currently experiencing indexing issues which may cause stale search results.
We’re currently experiencing indexing issues that may cause stale search results in some cases. We’ll update this thread when we can provide more information.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 2, 2020
The extent of the issue is not known at this time. The exact issue is also unknown, as “stale search results” is rather vague.
Google has had indexing issues in the recent past which always involved either one of two things happening.
New content was either not being indexed, or previously indexed content fell out of Google’s index.
Presumably this issue involves new content not being indexed, which would account for Google warning people about stale search results.
However, it doesn’t look like that’s the case this time. An easy way to check is to perform a “site:” search for your domain, click on Tools, and then set the filter to “past hour” or “past 24 hours.”
That’s the best way to check if your recent content is being indexed. I checked a handful of different sites and it appears all of their recent content is being indexed as well.
Based on my extremely limited testing, it doesn’t seem like this issue is preventing new content from being indexed. At least not on a large scale.
We won’t know for sure until Google provides more information. At this time it’s hard to tell what the problem is, but this post will be updated when we learn more.
This is a developing story…