Google: We Fixed Web Indexing Issues With Google News Publishers

Google's Lisa Wang said yesterday, about 12 hours ago, that they fixed the indexing issues some news publishers were experiencing. In short, news publisher's content would not show in the web search results, for hours and sometimes days, after the content was indexed. Google says this is now resolved.

Lisa Wang from Google wrote in the ongoing Google News Help thread "The issue has been fixed. There is no action you need to take on your end. Thank you for raising this and for your patience as we worked to resolve."

I tried it myself and I was able to find an article I posted minutes ago indexed and ranking both in web search and news search.

Web Search:

News Search:

Yesterday, I was unable to see my stories in web search hours and hours after they were published. Now they all seem to be coming up fine, at least for me.

Although, not all publishers are confirming their issues are resolved. Here are some comments in the thread after Lisa posted that this was fixed:

Hi Lisa. The problem is undoubtedly a lot better but we're still seeing shorter delays on a lot of articles.

Hi Lisa, I second comment from Chris

We are still experiencing delays in articles being indexed.

There has been a significant improvement today, but there are still articles published several hours ago which have not yet been indexed on Google News

It does not appear as though the problem has been fixed for us yet

@rustybrick @GordonKelly @richardnaz @InvestomaniaUK @sarojnayak_twit @thepoundlive @chrismoranuk

Excuse me @dannysullivan. Since yesterday night we see a improvement in this, but seems like we have big delay issues with indexation again. https://t.co/LawQ0s6u36

— David Esteve (@DeiviZzZ) November 14, 2018

So not everyone is seeing this as fully resolved yet but Google said it is.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Update 1: It is 8:10am and this article is still not showing up in Google web search or news search.

Update 2: The Guardian is also reporting improvements but ongoing issues:

Yep. There's no question here at @guardian. Definite improvement but we're still seeing pieces indexing with significant lag.

— Chris Moran (@chrismoranuk) November 14, 2018

Update 3: 3 hours later, the article is now in Google.

Update 4: Danny from Google replied but truth it, it may now be resolved for real this time:

Thanks, Danny. Right now our side looks a lot more normal, thank goodness. Significant change in last two hours.

— Chris Moran (@chrismoranuk) November 14, 2018