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Google Sitemaps Report Bug May Show Huge Decline In Indexed Pages

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The Google Search Console, aka Webmaster Tools, has a new bug that is concerning many webmasters and marketers. Many webmasters are noticing huge declines in the number of indexed pages being displayed in the Google Sitemaps report.

I’ve seen cases of hundreds of thousands of pages being displayed as no longer being indexed by Google. Here is a picture of one such report showing a huge drop in index counts on July 14, 2015:

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There are dozens of examples, as I explained above.

Google is indeed aware of the issue and said they are working on resolving it. Gary Illyes from Google told me on Twitter “it’s confirmed” as a bug and the Google team is “working on it.”

So no need to panic if you’ve seen a decline in your index count in this report on July 14. It is just a reporting glitch and doesn’t affect your traffic or rankings in Google.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.