After noticing changes in Google since September 23rd and actually calling out canonical issues with Google a few days later, Google has now confirmed the indexing bugs where pages were dropping out of the index. The issue was two-fold Google said; one with canonicalization and the other with mobile-indexing.
Google posted on Twitter last night, October 1st that the company is "currently working to resolve two separate indexing issues that have impacted some URLs." The issues were with mobile-indexing and with canonicalization. Google said that "in either case, pages might not be indexed." "If a previously indexed page has gone, it might be the mobile-indexing issue, where we’re failing to select any page at all to index. If the canonical issue is involved, URL Inspector may show the URL as a duplicate & the Google-selected canonical will be different from it," Google added.
If a previously indexed page has gone, it might be the mobile-indexing issue, where we’re failing to select any page at all to index. If the canonical issue is involved, URL Inspector may show the URL as a duplicate & the Google-selected canonical will be different from it….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020
Google is working on a fix just now, yes, several days after we kind of reported it. But Google said they will let us know when it is resolved but updating that Twitter thread. Google apologized for the problems, of course.
There’s no action to take with these issues on the part of site owners. We apologize for the issues here and are working rapidly to resolve them. We’ll update this thread as each is corrected.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020
Pages are returning: I am seeing reports from those impacted by this issue saying their pages are returning to the index. Google has not confirmed it is fixed yet but it is encouraging to see reports from the field on this. Someone impacted by this at WebmasterWorld said this morning:
8 days stressful battle is over - My articles are returning back to the index and I am still ranking well! Top pages are also back. Thank you all for your support happy
Glenn Gabe shared an example on Twitter:
Awesome to see urls getting indexed again that were incorrectly canonicalized due to the Google bug! Here's a top performing url for a news publisher that dropped off a cliff. As of late Thursday, it popped back into the index & gained impressions & clicks. Here's GSC & GA data: pic.twitter.com/85Q5wxgm9H
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 2, 2020
I did ask Danny Sullivan of Google to confirm if this issue started on September 23rd or so and what percentage of the index was impacted. He said the issue was at least a few days ago but did not have a date for us.
Two issues, both past few days, I don’t have exact dates offhand.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 2, 2020
I am not sure if our, the SEO community's complaints, is what Google's attention on this matter. I mean, they did ask us for examples or some larger "publications" complaining?
To update, we found an issue with indexing that's not unique to just the Daily Caller. We're working to correct this for a variety of sites across the web, and our apologies for this to all for it. More is here: https://t.co/0VwLqGAzfG
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 1, 2020
I should add, this comes after another indexing bug earlier this week specific to news sites that lasted a couple of hours.
At least we got a confirmation, right? So back to it.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
