Google has confirmed the issue which manifested last week causing pages to be deindexed is now fully resolved.
The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2019
The company did not provide any further details as to what caused the problem. I suppose the most important thing is that it’s fixed.
To catch up on what happened, see our report from earlier in the week.
In short, an issue was detected that caused a large number of sites to have their pages drop out of Google’s index.
Google confirmed it knew about the problem, but did not confirm what percentage of sites were affected.
Throughout this week several updates were provided by Danny Sullivan via the Google Search Liaison account on Twitter.
The issue ended up being resolved later than expected but was still resolved in less than a week.
Good on Google for working this out in a relatively timely manner. Hopefully, that helped mitigate that damage to sites that had numerous pages deindexed.
Google’s consistent updates on Twitter were no doubt appreciated as well. At no point were site owners completely in the dark about what was going on or when they could expect a fix.
Even Google is not perfect, but at least the company is improving its response to handling issues when they occur.
Final Notes
Here are a few last notes about the deindexing problem before we put the issue to bed completely.
There’s nothing for site owners to do in response to this issue. Google’s John Mueller said that everything will settle back down all on its own.
Sites may still have un-indexed pages going forward, which is normal. Google has never indexed every single page on the web, nor does it aspire to. Only pages of value are indexed.
Here’s how Mueller puts it:
“… 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.”
Naturally, sites that were affected by the issue can expect to see a drop in data in Google Analytics and Search Console from April 4 to April 10.
