Google is addressing a widespread technical issue that has resulted in web pages being removed from its index. This issue has impacted webmasters and SEOs since last Thursday, though Google only officially acknowledged the problem on Saturday.
On Saturday, Google’s John Mueller mistakenly announced that the problem had been resolved:
“Sorry — We had a technical issue on our side for a while there — this should be resolved in the meantime, and the affected URLs reprocessed. It’s good to see that the Inspect URL tool is also useful for these kinds of cases though!”
A day later, on Sunday, Danny Sullivan released a follow-up statement via the Search Liaison account. It appears that the indexing issues are mostly resolved and are on track to be fully fixed.
“We’re aware of indexing issues that impacted some sites beginning on Friday. We believe the issues are mostly resolved and don’t require any special efforts on the part of site owners. We’ll provide another update when the issues are considered fully resolved.”
According to the statement, site owners do not need to take any action to resolve the issue, as it is entirely on Google’s end. However, for high-priority pages that need immediate indexing, site owners can use the Inspect URL tool. This tool allows Google to recrawl and reprocess specific pages, albeit one URL at a time.
While the Inspect URL tool is not suitable for processing a large number of pages, it is a reasonable option for a select few. Mueller notes that even when the issue is fully resolved, not all URLs will be reindexed.
“One thing to add here – we don’t index all URLs on the web, so even once it’s reprocessed here, it would be normal that not every URL on every site is indexed. Awesome sites with minimal duplication help us recognize the value of indexing more of your pages.”
Mueller reassures that things will eventually “settle back like before,” which is positive news for those worried about rankings being affected by this situation.
As of now, Google has not provided specific details on the cause of the error.
