Yesterday Google posted an explanation or post mortem of the indexing issues the company has experienced over the past few months. I am happy the company posted something but to be honest, I find it to be a weak post mortem at best. Or maybe it just simply was not a post mortem of the issues?
The post really did not share anything new about the issues that Google experienced, which ultimately impacted our sites and our clients sites. They just repeated that there were issues and what they did to communicate about the issues and that no one likes that there are issues. Yea, I get it.
But if you read post mortem from other companies, such as numerous AWS examples, AWS gets into what went wrong, how the issue happened and what they are going to do to prevent it from happening again. Just see the numerous examples of what AWS posted. I mean, those go into crazy detail.
Now, I don't expect Google to do the same - although I think AWS has similar security concerns that Google may have? But at least tell us why Google had indexing issues.
Indexing new content maybe had a bottleneck issue? Losing content from Google's index may have been to someone deleting something and then that replicating through the data centers? I mean, AWS specifically goes through what went wrong, why it escalated to a bigger issue and what they will do to prevent it from happening again. Of course, AWS has paying customers with SLAs, so there is a difference.
But I don't see anything new that we did not know from this blog post that we did not already know from previous community from Google.
So when Google said they would share more details - I did expect a bit more.
Don't get me wrong, I am happy they posted this and it is good to have a single post in one place to cite and send people to. But again, I was expecting a bit more. Yea, I know, I am ungrateful and whatever...
Kudos to @VincentCourson who spent the past few weeks researching a Google indexing bug we had earlier this year to produce today's @googlewmc explainer post. Most important are the lessons we've learned to better communicate when such things happen: https://t.co/QhE4V316KV
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 12, 2019
Here's us sharing what happened last week in Search, what we've learned from it and what we're doing about it now :) https://t.co/zX3HLveXsT
— Martin Splitt @ 🇨🇭🏡 (@g33konaut) August 12, 2019
This post was long in production to cover the April issue in depth, to help give some insight. It wasn't written on Friday. That's why there was no time to get into that. Plus, the real focus is more about how we've learned to react in such cases with improving communication.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 12, 2019
Did you expect to hear more?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
