Something weird is going on with the Google search index. I am seeing wide spread reports of SEOs and webmasters complaining that their URLs and web pages are being removed from the Google Index. Lots of folks are noticing that a nice percentage of their web sites are no longer coming up for a site command or showing in Search Console as being indexed.
You can use the fetch feature and once you do that, the page should return back in the index almost immediately but if 50% of your pages have been dropped, that might take a while to do.
A WebmasterWorld thread has a ton of complaints and I am seeing tons of threads in the official Google Search Console forums as well. And yes, folks on Twitter are noticing issues and posting as well.
Here are some quotes but there are tons of complaints in the forums, I can't quote or link to them all:
Me Too Spiekerooger but see my post above yours. I am also from germany and the reason could be, that the pages are not anymore in the index. It looks like there is some error in the google serps. see for example:
Yes, I see the same across many big domains. URL of home page suddenly dropped from google index. No changes to meta or robots.txt done. Search Console -> URL Inspection -> Live Test gives a good looking screenshot. No message of manual action.
Yep, that's what I'm seeing as well. And it's not on all datacenters by google. You see at least two different sets of serps w/ gone pages or not every other minute.
check if the pages are indexed. For all positions we have lost, the site: command gives no result anymore and I hope, when google has fixed this, the rankings will come back.
what the heck, you are right: 50% dropped of the index
Looks like the indexes are misbehaving still. I see that the indexes are intact in one machine where as in an another machine, it isn't there.
Many on Twitter also:
anyone out there having any trouble getting a new pages indexed after Florida? please RT
— josh bachynski (@joshbachynski) April 4, 2019
Might be an issue with the new indexer/SC?
Might be a new more stringent filter released with Florida?
Hi @JohnMu we are detecting masive deindexing pages in different websites. It's both on hompages or URL pages. We fixed it by indexing them again with @SearchConsole. Is this a bug of SC? #seo
— 🔴Miguel Cidre🚀 (@MiguelCidrex) April 5, 2019
yes on many sites
— Raphael Doucet (@RaphSEO) April 5, 2019
I noticed this a few hours ago for @DeepCrawl SERPs listing. Not sure if it is related. Their homepage isnt showing up. pic.twitter.com/nbTXcZRbGP
— Chris Lever (@sitebee) April 5, 2019
Google IS Dropping Pages Out Of The Search Index; A Bug? - https://t.co/y9PLGmkDVI. We are seeing some examples of this atm.
— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) April 5, 2019
Same here - but after fetching the pages in GSC again, rankings returned immediately. Looks like a strange bug.
— Daniel (@DanielHerndler) April 5, 2019
John Mueller is starting to get wind of this:
Can you send me the URL? happy to take a quick look!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 5, 2019
Sounds weird -- feel free to drop me some examples, happy to take a look! Maybe it's just .. Eddies in the in the space-time continuum of search indexation ...
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 5, 2019
This is not just about pages not showing up for site commands, it seems like pages are not ranking anymore and traffic is being impacted.
I suspect this is some sort of bug with Google's index but we have not heard anything official from Google.
For now, just know, you are not alone and I will try to dig up more information for you all.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Search Console forums.
Update: This was fixed Saturday, April 6th. Google won't say what happened but it seems there was a bug that caused this. Here are John's tweets:
Sorry -- We had a technical issue on our side for a while there -- this should be resolved in the meantime, and the affected URLs reprocessed. It's good to see that the Inspect URL tool is also useful for these kinds of cases though!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 6, 2019
That's unlikely :-). Our internal systems are pretty unique.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 6, 2019
No, the change in reporting in Search Console wouldn't change indexing.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 6, 2019
Sunday Update: It is still ongoing but should be addressed soon:
We're aware of indexing issues that impacted some sites beginning on Friday. We believe the issues are mostly resolved and don't require any special efforts on the part of site owners. We'll provide another update when the issues are considered fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 7, 2019
I don't have an ETA. I would expect it to be soon, matter of hours maybe but can't guarantee that, which is why we said we'd give a further update when we know it's all clear.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 7, 2019
One thing to add here - we don't index all URLs on the web, so even once it's reprocessed here, it would be normal that not every URL on every site is indexed. Awesome sites with minimal duplication help us recognize the value of indexing more of your pages.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 7, 2019
Update 3: Still waiting on Google fixing the issue - I have a new cleaner story over here on the issue.
Update 4: Google is almost fully done resolving the issue, we have an update on April 9th at 8:30am over here.
