Yesterday we reported on something lingering for a couple weeks around Google not indexing new URLs fast enough, like they use to. Well, I asked John Mueller of Google about it in the video hangout yesterday and he said he looked into it and Google's indexing process is working fine, no changes there. He did add that it appears in some of the cases, some of those folks relied on the fetch as Google submit URL feature, which has been limited recently. But overall, there are no issues.
John said "I have been looking into a bunch of those but for the most part it really seems like it's just working as normal." He added that even more so, Google has been "crawling a bit more than than usual at the moment" so he would think Google would "pick these things up" faster, not slower.
This starts 7:27 into the video:
Transcript:
Barry: So a lot of people were reporting in the past, actually a couple weeks, about new URLs not being indexed by Google. Even using the fetch as Google, which has their issues now. I honestly thought it was just people complaining, and there's typical general indexing issues of Google just choosing not to index that content. But I'm seeing a really large number of complaints, not just in the google forums, or Twitter, but from SEO is that do know their stuff. So I'm wondering if it's something you guys are looking into or if you found any issues around this?
John: I have been looking into a bunch of those but for the most part it really seems like it's just working as normal.
And sometimes we do index stuff very quickly, sometimes we don't index stuff very quickly.
I believe we're crawling a bit more than than usual at the moment. So usually we pick these things up.
One of the things that I've kind of noticed in looking into a lot of these issues, is that a lot of people relied on the submit to indexing tool in Search Console, where you manually submit URLs to be indexed. And that's something that kind of surprised me because I thought the normal methods of submitting content into Google should just work. So I imagine like, for example, you with your site you wouldn't manually submit every page that you write and say like hey Google I wrote this new article so I pick it up quickly. But you just kind of like put it in your feed and your feed gets picked up and gets pinged automatically by the CMS. So that's kind of what what we expect like a normal set up to do. Is that you wouldn't need to rely on any kind of manual work to get your day-to-day work done, essentially.
But it's interesting that people relied on this so much. So I'm kind of wondering if if there are things in the automated processes that we need to tune. So I have been looking into a bunch of these cases to see what kind of has been happening there in the past. Why they might be seeing a difference there to figure out what we can do there to improve that.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
