Google has a new method to debug and ultimately report indexing issues with Google Search. Google opened up a new form where currently US based site owners can report issues directly to Google around Google Search indexing. Here is how it works.
You can access the form to report an indexing issue over here or through the "report an indexing issue" button on the footer of this help document or that help document. You must be signed into your Google account to report these indexing issues to Google.
Here is what the button currently looks like:
The form will ask you for your name and website address. It will then ask you a series of question to confirm the indexing issue may be on Google's end and not on your end. The question starts by asking you if your website or web pages are not Indexed in Google Search or if your website or web pages are Indexed but aren’t ranking appropriately in search results.
Here is the full form expanded but if you answer some questions the a different way, Google will direct you to a help article that helps you fix the indexing issue on your end.
Either way this is a great step to let some site owners notify Google of indexing issues or at least direct them to the correct location to debug those indexing issues internally.
Here are Google's tweets announcing this:
The best way to resolve indexing issues is to first consult our community forums and support documentation, which also highlight helpful tools: https://t.co/zAnLOaWsCYhttps://t.co/IVZUc0z8H9
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 28, 2021
We are currently piloting this in the US only and it should be fully available to all in the US within a week or less. We will reassess the usefulness of a support expansion in this direction in a few weeks.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 28, 2021
Many of the time, the indexing issues are issues with your site either technically or quality wise but in those cases where it is not, then here you go. This is not to say Google never has internal issues, they have had plenty.
Here is an example from this morning where John Mueller of Google debugged a list of URLs, which just shows you how this kind of works:
#1: we haven't seen it (no internal links crawled)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 29, 2021
#2: we saw it, but didn't find it useful to index
#3: still fresh, unclear if we'll index it (or like #2)
#4: unknown (like #1)
#5: indexed
#6: indexed
Forum discussion at Twitter.
