Google confirmed serving issue with Google Search results

“There’s an ongoing issue with our serving system in Google Search that’s affecting a small number of sites,” Google said on Twitter Thursday morning. Google confirmed at 11:30am ET, that it fixed the issue. The issue started at about 4:30 a.m. ET and lasted several hours.

The tweet. Here is the tweet so you can read it yourself:

The issue. At around 4:30 a.m. there were reports, which I covered on the Search Engine Roundtable, that Google was having issues indexing or crawling or serving new content from both major and smaller publishers. I showed screenshots of Google not showing new content from publishers like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and niche publishers like TechCrunch and The Verge.

Here are some of those screenshots:

But then at around 6:30 a.m. ET, it seemed like Google fixed the issue. Well, it seems Google did not fully resolve the issue because now the company officially confirmed the issue on Twitter.

Smaller publishers? If I look at what Google indexed on my personal site in the past 24 hours, it shows a story from yesterday, that was published before Google had these serving issues. And a story that I manually pushed to Google using the request indexing issue in Search Console. It does not show the several other stories I published this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable.

But even now, if I do a site command for wsj.com and filter to show stories in the past hour, I am still seeing the issue, after I thought it was resolved:

Resolved. Google has fixed the issue at around 11:30 a.m. ET today, here are the notifications Google posted about this:

Why we care. If you are having issues with Google now showing your recent content in Google Search today, December 16, 2021, do not worry, it seems to be an issue on Google’s end. Google is working on resolving it.

Until then, I guess try to use Google Search Console to push your content into Google Search and hope that works. Also it is a time to remind you that having other channels to drive traffic to your site, like social media, email marketing, direct traffic and other means is important.

Now that it is fixed, you should now see your content showing up in Google Search.