It seems like the past month or so has been a tough one for the Google engineers. We have seen bug after bug, many we haven't even covered yet over here. The question is, are they related and when will most of them be resolved. Of course, one thing we can expect, mistakes will happen in the future.
Just to summarize, here are the stories around bugs in Google in the past couple of weeks or so:
- Google Fixing Another Indexing Bug With Google News
- Google's Indexing Bug Spreads Like A Virus To Coverage Report, URL Inspection Tool & More
- Google Cache Date Is Old; Google Says Don't Worry About It
- Google: We Fully Fixed The Google De-Indexing Bug
- Google Recipe Rich Results & Mobile Friendly Bugs Reported
- Google's Index Bug With Pages Being De-Indexed Is Almost Fixed
- Google Algorithm Update Tools Going Off - Is It A False Alarm?
- Google Still Working On Reindexing Pages That Dropped Out Of The Index From Thursday
- Google Is Dropping Pages Out Of The Search Index; A Bug?
So I asked John Mueller if maybe a lot of these other bugs are related to the indexing bug. I said, indexing is core to how things work at Google, so it makes sense some could be related. He kind of said, yes, and we should wait for the indexing bugs to be fully resolved (it is resolved but the lingering impact is still out there).
I asked John about this 2:33 into the video:
Barry Schwartz: Hi John. Around the indexing bugs or indexing bug that's resolved and now it's impacting Search Console, I’ll assume that we fixed fairly soon. But there's lots of like small bugs that seem to be happening maybe around that like cache dates, rich results, recipe results, mobile-friendly bugs, they're all unrelated or it's hard to say what's related to the indexing bug? Because obviously indexing is kind of core to all these other things working.
John Mueller: Yeah. I don't know. So oh my gosh. Okay, I can't say anything anymore.
So my general thought is a lot of these... Like you said, indexing is pretty core, so if there's anything broken with indexing then it's probably worthwhile to wait to get that to settle down first before assuming that all of these other issues are completely separate.
So I suspect some of them are separate like the, I don't know, that the message I I've seen from a bunch of people is around the mobile what is its mobile friendliness thing, where or people are getting notifications that their site isn't like theirs mobile-friendly or some of the pages are. I suspect that something that's unrelated because it's something I've seen from earlier but some of the other issues especially if they've just come up in the last couple of days I tend to wait until the the indexing things have settled down before assuming that they're completely separate.
Barry Schwartz: And how long do you think we need to wait, a week or so?
John Mueller: I don't know. At this point I'm afraid to make any predictions. I hope that this is something that will be resolved fairly quickly but sometimes these things take take a lot longer than we expect. But it is definitely something that we're taking fairly seriously and making sure that when it's resolved that it's really resolved and that we can notify folks when when we think that either we we have a clearer timeline or we we've been able to resolve it. So I wouldn't assume like hours but I think weeks would also be too long. So somewhere in the area of you know days. It's really hard to say.
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I then asked about how big of an impact this was, which lead me to write Does Google owe us more than just an apology over de-indexing? at Search Engine Land:
Barry Schwartz: The final question is could you anyway give us some type of estimate in terms of how large, what type of percentage of the index was impacted by this. I know Moz came out with their metrics but they only look that like at 23,000 URLs or something like that and you guys have a lot more URLs than 23,000 URLs in your index.
John Mueller: A few more. Hopefully we keep them.
I don’t know. It is something where we. What happens with a lot of these situations where something breaks is we do a kind of postmortem. Where the team that is involved looks into what went wrong, the steps that lead to that, where we got lucky, where we got unlucky, where things ended up going even worse, and what the overall impact was. And usually that is something that the team do when the issues are resolved. They start on that when things are being worked on but they tend to work on afterwards. From my point of view, I first need to wait to see what they come up with and then it is a matter of is this something where we won’t be able to talk about the numbers or we would be able to talk about the numbers. What kind of numbers would be reasonable to mention. Those are kind of open questions there.
Here is the video embed:
Thanks Dave:
There's @rustybrick with the tough questions for @JohnMu in today's Hangout. :)
— Beanstalk IM (@beanstalkim) April 16, 2019
Good question though about whether the indexing bug is related to other bugs we're seeing. pic.twitter.com/5CdfQTpxJo
Forum discussion at Twitter.
