Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about Search Console’s Page Indexing report that appeared to have stopped updating, suggesting that maybe SEOs need to relax about data freshness.
Question About Search Console Indexing Delays
A Redditor posted that their Search Console Indexing report had not updated since October 16. They were concerned that the reporting had stopped working and shared the concern that this was another in search console’s index reporting “quirks.” They wanted to know whether other SEOs were experiencing the same problem or if the problem was isolated to their website.
They posted:
“GSC Page Indexing report hasn’t updated since Oct 16th – is the data pipeline stalled for anyone else?
I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing major delays in Google Search Console right now. my Page Indexing report is completely frozen. The last update was on October 16th, and there have been zero changes or new data points since. The graph just flatlines.
I know GSC reporting delays are a common pain point, but a stall this long feels unusual. I’ve seen John Mueller and Barry Schwartz discuss GSC indexing/reporting quirks before, so I figured I’d ask here to see if this is a widespread issue or just something specific to my properties right now.
A few questions for the community:
Is your Page Indexing report updating normally for your accounts?
I am also curious that are you experts seeing delays across all GSC reports, or just the indexing data?
Any known workarounds, or are we just stuck waiting for Google to fix the pipeline?
I would love to hear if other SEOs are seeing this exact same freeze so we can figure out if it’s a bug on Google’s end. Thanks!”
Even if one knows that Search Console reporting generally tends to reflect actual indexing trends it’s still surprising to see it “freeze” up and flatline. It’s the kind of thing that happens to someone else. So when it happens to a person it’s not unreasonable to suspect that maybe this time there’s something going wrong at Google.
John Mueller Questions The Need For Fresh Indexing Data
Mueller’s response focused on the relatively stable indexing numbers for the website and whether there was a reason to expect the reported numbers to change. He explained that indexing doesn’t necessarily change quickly and that when changes do occur, they become visible in Search Console’s Performance reports first.
Mueller responded:
“It looks like you have a relatively new site and the numbers have been relatively stable. What are you expecting to see in refreshed data? Indexing doesn’t change quickly, and when it does, you see that reflected in the performance reports first.
…If you search for “qHt8WP_euoY” you should find an older video on this topic (who needs URLs when you can search for IDs :-)).”
Mueller’s indirectly addressed the issue of a reporting delay by recommending a 16 year old video of former Google engineer Matt Cutts explaining why Search Console (then known as Webmaster Tools) was constantly monitored and unlikely to have an overlooked problem. Reading between the lines, it’s hard to miss that the video was published nearly twenty years ago and is used to explain the standard of engineering at Google today.
Here is what Matt Cutts said about Search Console report bugs:
“So just to be safe, I pinged the Webmaster Tools team and I said, hey, we track these errors and keep an eye on them, right?
And got back just a couple very, very polite but slightly indignant responses along the lines of we have extensive monitoring for our front end, we make sure our pipelines run regularly, we monitor this and that.
So the short answer is, when crazy errors fly out, whether they be system errors or whenever things are not running correctly, we have a wide variety of things to monitor that and try to track that so that we can fix it ourselves because we don’t want to rely on users to have to report that to us.
… I think within any engineering team at Google, you’d usually get back that sort of response, they’d say, Well, of course we keep our eye out for these sort of errors and try to fix them immediately.
It’s a perfectly reasonable, completely normal question to ask. But you might be aware that that’s a little like poking at an engineer and saying, hey, are you a good engineer or not?”
Cutts acknowledged that there could be data quality issues from time to time and encouraged users to report them, but that in general Google has systems in place to catch when something is going wrong because that’s good engineering.
Google Prioritizes Reporting Updates Based On Their Usefulness
Mueller next explained that Google doesn’t consider it useful to continually comment on the freshness of every Search Console report. He suggested that SEOs shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about reporting delays and said that Google prioritizes faster updates where the information is most useful.
He explained:
“I don’t think it makes sense for me / us to comment on the data freshness for all reports all the time, this is why we put dates in there. I realize Barry & co (hi!) write about everything and it can feel like it’s important to focus on it, but honestly, save your energy. Complex systems are complex, and we prioritize faster updates there where we think it’s actually useful for folks.”
What Mueller is saying is that the freshness of reports is based on how useful it believes that information will be to users.
Takeaways
One way to think about Search Console reporting is that there are two separate processes involved. Google is crawling and indexing websites, and Search Console is reporting information about that activity. A delay in the reporting doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem in reporting.
The Matt Cutts video from sixteen years ago adds another dimension to understanding how Google monitors for system failures, that it’s a baked-in stance on the part of engineers to have those systems in place so that they can catch them before most users experience them.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/ra2 studio
