Today, Google’s official Webmasters Twitter account announced that a day-long indexing issue has been resolved. This is yet another technical issue in a series. Although Google has had outages in the past, the frequency of these issues within a short timeframe is unusual.
According to the official tweet: “The indexing issues from earlier today have been resolved. Thank you for your patience.”
A web publisher in India remarked that the resolution had not yet reached him, stating: “Still getting results in top stories from 2018, 2015. Is this rolled out globally?” In response, a Google representative asked for a search query to verify the claim but did not receive a response.
Google’s index is distributed across multiple data centers worldwide, meaning that a fix in Mountain View, California, does not necessarily mean it’s fixed everywhere, such as in India. To check, I accessed the web through an Indian IP address and opened a fresh Google Chrome browser (Canary) to check the search results. The search results for the query “Modi” appeared up to date, indicating that news results are current in India.
It seems that Google is experiencing unprecedented failures related to its search index since the March 2019 update, affecting both the index and associated tools.
On April 8, 2019, Google experienced a significant issue causing de-indexing of many web pages. Reports indicated that Google was working to fix the issue, which webmasters and SEOs had been dealing with since the previous Thursday. Google only officially acknowledged the issue by Saturday.
Additionally, data from April 9 to April 25 was reported missing from Google Search Console. Google announced that this period’s data was replaced with data from April 26, resulting in more than half a month of inaccurate data in Search Console.
On May 2, a member of a private Facebook group suggested that Google was undergoing a major infrastructure update, a view that several prominent members of the search community agreed with. This aligns with my previous article suggesting a Google infrastructure update might be occurring.
It seems too coincidental for so many issues to arise following the March 2019 update. Google’s lack of explanation has caused concern within the web publishing community. Although Google does not owe an explanation, understanding these issues is significant to many in the community.
