This morning at 1:48 am ET, Google confirmed a Google Search ranking bug impacting a large number of the Google Search results. Google wrote, "There's an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that's affecting a large number of search results."
Google said they found the root cause and said the issue is completely unrelated to the August 2024 core update. "We've identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout." Google wrote.
John Mueller from Google added on LinkedIn, "Sometimes we have issues in our systems (like everyone), and we want to be transparent about them for users & site-owners. This issue is unrelated to the core update that's currently rolling out."
So why again does this happen after a Google search ranking update? John wrote, "Unfortunately you can't pick the timing of issues, sorry. We'll update on the search status dashboard as things evolve - both for this issue, as well as for the roll-out of the core update."
John also added in the comments area on LinkedIn, "We try to post about them once they're known to be a visible issue. Since it's unrelated, even if this were known & posted beforehand, I don't know if it would influence the decision to roll out the core update (less confusion is obviously better for roll-outs, but, just as an unrelated example, if the search results were accidentally colored green, that wouldn't affect how a change about how titles are made is rolled out)."
Maybe all the ranking fluctuations and volatility we posted about yesterday was this bug and not the August 2024 core update?
The last bug we saw was a Google Search indexing bug in June right after the June spam update was released.
So I guess any ranking changes you are seeing now, disregard until this is fixed.
Forum discussion at X.
Update: At 12:29 pm ET, Google posted an update that reads, "We're still working on fixing the issue with ranking. Next update will be within 72 hours."
Update: 6:21am ET on August 19th, it is still not fixed:
The Google search ranking bug post August core update release is still not fixed but it’s still being worked on. Wow. Thought Google would fix it by now. More at https://t.co/r7WcpNkJHz pic.twitter.com/DWV5dcOyxM
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 19, 2024
Update: 11:00am ET on August 19th, John Mueller said while it is not fully fixed, the visible effect is no longer there. He wrote on LinkedIn, "Unfortunately the team isn't quite happy with calling it complete just yet (I don't think there's any visible effect anymore though), so we said we'll update again in 2 days."
Update: August 20 at 8:10 am ET - Google fixed the search ranking bug.
