Google Search may be having a new indexing or serving (or both) bug where it is now showing new content from sites that are creating new content. Sites like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, CNN, Forbes, and others are showing very few new pages being indexed in the past hour by Google Search.
While all of these sites have produced dozens of stories in the past hour, most are showing 0 to 10 new content (URLs) in the Google Search index in the past hour.
Google has not posted any issue yet in its Search Status Dashboard and I do not see massive complaints yet but I received a notice on X about this (that post was deleted) but I still see the issue.
Confirmed: Google posted about the incident on its Search Status Dashboard and a Google spokesperson sent me this statement:
There was an issue that was briefly affecting indexing in Google Search. We’ve addressed the issue and indexing should be working normally now.
The dashboard reads:
Google is investigating reports about delayed indexing in Google Search. We're working on identifying the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours.
Then it was updated to say:
We identified and fixed the issue with indexing. Sites may still experience some delayed indexing until the previously affected URLs have been reprocessed. There will be no more updates.
Here are some examples:
- site:cnn.com - within hour - 2 results:
- site:wsj.com - within hour 2 results:
WSJ down to nothing:
- site:nytimes.com - within hour 10 results:
- site:hollywoodreporter.com - within hour - 2 results:
- site:forbes.com - within hour 0 results:
Here are more examples of massive news sites not seeing much content in the Google index in the past hour:
I often see indexing complaints about Google Search but I rarely see it on sites this big that produce a lot of content.
We last had a larger issue like this in January 2024, then in December 2023, October 2023 and then many more over the years.
Are any of you seeing this?
Update at 7:30pm ET: I waited over 30 minutes for this story to be indexed by Google and it was not. Normally this site is indexed within minutes of a story going live.
So I checked Google Search Console and it said the page was crawled on Jun 20, 2024, 7:14:49 PM but the page was not in the Google index:
Meanwhile, the live URL inspection tool says there is nothing preventing it from being indexed:
I did request indexing manually to be sure - but still, not indexed.
Forum discussion at X.
Update - Confirmed: Google posted about the incident on its Search Status Dashboard and a Google spokesperson sent me this statement:
There was an issue that was briefly affecting indexing in Google Search. We’ve addressed the issue and indexing should be working normally now.
The dashboard reads:
Google is investigating reports about delayed indexing in Google Search. We're working on identifying the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours.
Then it was updated to say:
We identified and fixed the issue with indexing. Sites may still experience some delayed indexing until the previously affected URLs have been reprocessed. There will be no more updates.
And this article is now indexed, so it seems fixed - but some sites still may take more time to see it being resolved.
Here are the stories I published the following morning already indexed:
