Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.”
But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not show breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular magazines is something Google probably isn’t too happy about.
What it looks like. If you try to search for content from a popular news site and then filter to only show content within the past hour, you won’t currently be given any new real content from that site.
Even smaller sites like my personal blog that is in Google News is having issues as well:
So this does seem pretty widespread.
URL Inspection tool bugs. Related to this, Google said the URL Inspection tool within Google Search Console is also having issues. Google said on Twitter, “We recommend waiting for this issue to be resolved, and then checking the URLs later on. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the inconvenience!”
So if you want to try to manually submit your URLs to Google’s index through the tools inside of Google Search Console, you would be out of luck.
Again? Yes, again, Google had issues indexing new content back in May 2019 and also in April had an issue where Google de-indexed many sites back in April 2019.
Why we care. If Google is not able to index your new content, and if a lot of your Google traffic comes from fresh content, then your traffic will likely see a decline through the duration of this bug. This may also have an impact on your Google Search Console performance reports, so keep that in mind as well.
This is currently an ongoing issue and Google has not fixed it as of yet.
URL Inspection tool update: Google posted an update at 11:41am ET that the URL Inspection tool has been fixed. The indexing issues still seem to be having issues. Here is Google’s update:
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.