Today Google’s official Google Webmasters Twitter account tweeted that the day long indexing issue has been resolved. This is yet another in a series of technical issues. While Google has suffered outages in the past, Google has not experienced so many outages in such a short period of time.
“The indexing issues from earlier today have been resolved. Thank you for your patience.”
A web publisher in India tweeted that the resolution had not hit his shores.
“Still getting results in top stories from 2018, 2015. Is this rolled out globally?”
In response, a Googler asked for a search query to verify the claim but he received no response.
Google’s index is distributed multiple data centers worldwide. So if it’s fixed in Mountain View, California that doesn’t mean it’s also fixed in India.
So I accessed the web via an Indian IP address and opened a fresh Google Chrome browser (Canary) and checked the SERPs:
The top of the SERPs for the search query Modi is up to date:
A search query on Google.co.in , accessed with an Indian IP address shows that Google’s SERPs are showing up to date news.Position three of the organic SERPs also appears to be up to date:
Google’s Index is Fixed – No Explanation
Google has been experiencing a series of unprecedented failures related to its search index. Ever since Google’s March 2019 update, Google has been experiencing widespread issues with its index and associated tools.
April 8, 2019 Web Page De-indexing
Google’s index experienced a significant issue that caused it to de-index many web pages.
According to Matt Southern’s report:
“Google is working on fixing a widespread technical issue that has led to web pages getting removed from Google’s index.
Webmasters and SEOs have been affected by this issue since this past Thursday. Google didn’t officially acknowledge there was an issue until Saturday.”
Data from April 9 – 25 Missing from Google Search Console
Google then announced that most data from April 2019 was missing from the Google Search Console.
Search Engine Journal reported:
“Google has alerted site owners that nearly all of last month’s reports in Search Console were affected by a data outage.
A data outage occurred between April 9-25. The problem was fixed on April 26, however, the data was not recovered.
All missing data from April 9-25 was replaced with the data from April 26. So that means there’s over half a month of bad data in Search Console.”
Infrastructure Update?
On May 2nd a private Facebook group member posted that to his view there was no question that Google was undergoing a major infrastructure update. Several prominent members of the search community agreed.
That was interesting to see because I had intuited the same thing last week in my article, Google Infrastructure Update Right Now?
What is Going on With Google’s Index?
It seems highly coincidental that so many things have been going wrong after the March 2019 update. Yet Google is not offering an explanation of what is causing so many issues.
I’m not saying that Google owes the web publishing community an explanation. The point is that many in the web publishing community are concerned.
