Earlier this week, on the August 18th webmaster office hours with John Mueller, I asked John for more details on first the Google indexing failure on August 10th and then if he can share any details on what happened last Saturday, August 15th. The short answer is that no, he cannot share anything more about either of those topics.
The image above is to show John was a bit tight lipped on the topic. He said "sometimes we don't have a lot of internal details to share." Not necessarily because there isn't something to share but sometimes he said there are "lots of systems at Google and sometimes when when something kind of quirky happens for a really short period of time they just go off and fix it without letting everyone know."
So whatever happened on Saturday was short (although, I think it lasted all day) but I guess less people noticed because it was a Saturday and Google didn't really dig deep into what happened because they felt a public explanation was not needed?
Here is the video that starts 13:30 in to the video:
Sorry, I cannot change the YouTube thumbnail, so I did my best with the image above. :)
Here is the transcript:
John Mueller: We have the top question from Barry. Can you comment more on the August 10th indexing system failure and maybe what happened this past Saturday. See your favorite SEO blog for more details. How do you know what my favorite SEO blog is Barry that's it's like are you reading my email?
I don't have any more information. So my feeling is with the August 10 issue, that's something where it get resolved reasonably quickly and I don't know if the team would have more information to share on that publicly. And with regards to the one on the 15th, I don't know the details of what happened there.
But that also seemed like something where even you kind of didn't really see what exactly was changing, just like everyone was complaining and then suddenly it was gone. So maybe that was just something really short.
Barry Schwartz: So I think tech it wasn't it was only short because I didn't get back online until Saturday night but I think it happened Saturday morning. So I mean there's some screenshots from like Glenn Gabe and other people where it shows some pretty significant changes. Um and then things went back sometime around at night at least eastern time. Are you aware of anything that went wrong, not like specifically telling me what went wrong, but did something go wrong?
John Mueller: I don't know. I don't know. I really don't have any any additional information on that. I mean there are lots of systems at Google and sometimes when when something kind of quirky happens for a really short period of time they just go off and fix it without letting everyone know. Ii think the the earlier issue seemed to have been a bigger one and uh that's that's kind of also why it took a little bit longer to get everything redone and we ended up tweeting about it.
Sometimes we don't have a lot of internal details to share.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
