Yesterday afternoon I reported on one of the biggest Google updates we have seen in a long time. It was so big and the results were so all over the place, many suspected it was a bug. And a bug it was. A Google spokesperson confirmed with me over email last night " I confirmed with the team that this is a bug that we are fixing but still in the process of fully diagnosing, so we don't have specific details to share right now."
Later, John Mueller of Google shared a similar message on Twitter saying "I don't have all the details yet, but it seems like this was a glitch on our side and has been fixed in the meantime." So Google confirmed it was a bug and said it "has been fixed." Here is that tweet where he replied to my report:
I don't have all the details yet, but it seems like this was a glitch on our side and has been fixed in the meantime.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 11, 2020
If someone could fix the other 2020-issues, that would be great.
Just wow. Google told me the company will be giving me more details on what happened and if they do, I will share that with you all.
But things do look to be back to normal as of this morning. Here are some quotes from folks that confirmed it went back to normal:
My (anecdotal) guess is that this lasted up to 4 hours from 9am-1pm AEST. I suspect it might not be as severe as many may think if they did spot checks, mainly because I was seeing different results each time I checked. Either way, I'm glad this was just a glitch. pic.twitter.com/IHqywlH57a
— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) August 11, 2020
2 good exs of the volatility that happened yesterday evening when the glitch rolled out. Checking hourly trending in GA for Google organic traffic shows a surge that came back down w/in 6 hours. The other shows a big drop in hourly trending (10-15K per hour), which also reverted. pic.twitter.com/VLQlVvADaB
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 11, 2020
And here's a good example of a SERP during the glitch versus the live results. Notice the same domain showing up many times and the support-origin xbox urls don't resolve. The live results shows major publishers with articles about streaming on an xbox. I marked each screenshot: pic.twitter.com/wJmx4b6kST
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 11, 2020
All my serps rolled back to normal around 11:30 pm ET.
— I Like Ducks (@ropeadope18) August 11, 2020
I'm leaning bug -- settling back to normal now, but ~7pm ET our primary kws were all over the place. Some competitors held, many replaced by articles from large domains that don't normally rank, & we saw pages firmly entrenched in top 5 (even #1) for months/years down to 11-50+.
— Matt Rooney (@mjrooney9) August 11, 2020
But now things are revert back to normal I guess
— Osanda Cooray (@osandacooray) August 11, 2020
Looks like rankings are going a bit back to normal. I'm back top position for usual kw and serp showing Englishlinkedin result for my brand (vs Arabic a few hours ago)
— Yael Consulting (@yaelconsulting) August 11, 2020
The Timeline
Based on reviewing the SEO chatter on social media, at WebmasterWorld, at Black Hat World and the comments here, it seems things reverted back at around 11:30pm ET on August 10th.
The timeline: So this started as early as 1:30pm ET on August 10th, spiked significantly around 5pm on August 10th and then was reverted at around 11:30pm on August 10th.
Here are more quotes:
Well it didn't last long 11 to 12pm I was down to -14%. Now things look like they are back to normal.
Crazy results for a while. Appears to be back to normal again.
I'm seeing my site back to its original position on the SERP. Seems like it really is a glitch.
Add me to the list of people who saw +100% last night briefly and felt happy again that Google finally got one right. Of course it's a glitch. There is no happiness in this business.
Looks like this was the case, my traffic has bounced back to normal on my analytics from what I can tell after it all dropping drastically for a few hours.
My site is back, and I even got more traffic than the day before. Phew!
If you want to have fun just check out my original post with all the comments about the sky falling. It was insane and I am really concerned about how something like this could have happened. I know bugs, glitches, etc happen but wow.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
Update: Now Google said it was an "indexing issue" that caused this? This did not look like any of the previous indexing issues but what do I know?
On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) August 11, 2020
Thank you for your patience!
And now more on this from Gary:
The indexing system, Caffeine, does multiple things:
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) August 11, 2020
1. ingests fetchlogs,
2. renders and converts fetched data,
3. extracts links, meta and structured data,
4. extracts and computes some signals,
5. schedules new crawls,
6. and builds the index that is pushed to serving.
Don't oversimplify search for it's not simple at all: thousands of interconnected systems working together to provide users high quality and relevant results. Throw a grain of sand in the machinery and we have an outage like yesterday.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) August 11, 2020
Update 2: Here is what went wrong, at least, what we were told.
