It appears that Google’s indexing issues are resolved and Google is once again able to both crawl, index and rank fresh new content within minutes. Google has not officially confirmed this yet but our tests seem to show that this is the case.
What happened. Yesterday, in the early morning hours, Google stopped showing fresh content in its search results. If you filtered the news or web search results for content from sites that published content frequently, it would only show you content from before around
Resolved? Now, if you filter content from news sites you will see Google showing content from within minutes of the content being published. I was able to test this out on my personal blog and Google indexed the content within minutes.
Here is a screen shot of Google indexing a story I wrote around 7:20am this morning and displaying it in the search results minutes later:
Google thinks so too. While Google has yet to post an official response on the @googlewmc Twitter account, John Mueller from Google thinks it is resolved as well. John responded to my tweet saying “We’re still waiting for some final confirmations, but I think things are looking good now.”
Stay tuned. We will update this story when Google confirms the issue is resolved.
Why it matters. If you saw a dip in your Google traffic yesterday, and a lot of your traffic generally comes from new content, then you may have seen a drop in your Google News, Google Discover
The issue seemed to have occurred between around 3:00 a.m. ET on August 8th through around 3:00 a.m. ET on August 9th. But again, we are waiting for an official response from Google on this issue.
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.