Yesterday we reported Google was unable to index new content. Well, Google posted on Twitter earlier this morning that the issue is resolved:
What happened. It appears based on what I am hearing from Googlers that the search engine had some sort of issue getting new content into their index. So either Google had a crawling issue where they weren’t able to crawl new content, or more likely Google was crawling new content but was not able to fully index and process that new content due to some sort of bug or backlog.
If you posted a new piece of content yesterday, Google would have taken several hours to index that content. Now, Google is back to indexing new content, especially on sites that update often, like news sites, within minutes.
Data issues. Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter that he doesn’t expect there to be any data loss in Google Search Console related to this indexing issue. He said if the content wasn’t indexed than what data loss would there be. He also said “I don’t expect data loss, no. Emphasis on “expect.”
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.