Just to keep you all up to date on the issue with pages dropping out of the Google index starting last Thursday. It is currently still not fully resolved and we are in day five now. But Google seems to be just about done resolving it fully.
The latest is that Google posted yesterday at 4pm ET that it should be resolved within 12-24 hours. It has been past 12 hours but not yet 24 hours. Here is what Google posted:
We are still resolving the indexing issue that has impacted some pages. We've made further improvements and hope any remaining issues will be done within the next 12-24 hours. Will provide a further update when the issue is fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 8, 2019
Now, John Mueller from Google said on Reddit just a few hours ago that there are only a few data centers left to go for Google to fully resolve it. Google has many many servers with the index on it and for Google to fix it fully, all those servers need to get the latest index. So that can take time. Google is just about there. Here is what John wrote on Reddit:
We have a few data centers, so what you might be seeing in that case is just that it's already / still ok in one data-center, but not in the one you're looking at manually. I imagine what you'd see in a case like this is a reduced number of impressions in Search Console & reduced traffic from Search in Analytics, until it's fully indexed everywhere again.
Yes, the data anomalies page was also updated. You may see a drop in pages indexed in the Search Console reports, this is expected. Google wrote this morning, dating it April 5th:
Because of internal management of our Search index, some pages of your websites might have been dropped from our index for a period of a few days without any action on your part. The matter is currently being resolved, no action from your side is needed.
What is an "internal management?" Did someone at Google press the delete button? Was it that guy who worked at MySpace?
Anyway - you can expect Search Console reports to show issues from April 5th through probably April 9th. But most of the reports that would show that, don't seem to be updated yet anyway.
Oh and yes, there is nothing you need to do - Google is fixing it on your end:
This is why we earlier said there is nothing special to do. We working to resolve some of the indexing errors that are happening on our end, so that they're fully resolved and not reoccurring.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 8, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter and Reddit.
Update: They need more time, after the 24 hour window has been closed.
The indexing issue should be almost completely resolved within the next eight hours. Some documents might take an additional 12-24 hours to restore. We'll provide a further update when the issue is fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 9, 2019
Update 2: April 10th Google said they resolved the issue:
The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2019
