Google confirmed indexing issues causing some stale results

Google has confirmed that there are indexing issues in Google Search that are causing some stale search results. Google said “we’re currently experiencing indexing issues that may cause stale search results in some cases.”

The confirmation. Here is Google’s post on Twitter about this issue:

What are the issues. Earlier this morning, I reported on my personal blog, that it appears Google is having indexing issues. New content was not being shown for large publishers that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and for small publishers including my personal site.

Here is what it looked like this morning trying to find content on the Wall Street Journal web site that was published within an hour:

The issue does not appear to be as bad as it was this morning. So hopefully Google is already resolving the issue.

Again? Yes, Google had similar issues earlier this year, and a couple of times last year as well.

Why we care. If you run a site that depends on traffic for new content and breaking stories, you may be experiencing these traffic issues. Google wants to index content quickly and serve breaking content immediately, so Google takes these indexing issues seriously. Hopefully things will be back to normal with very shortly.

Google is working on a fix and hopefully these issues won’t happen again in the future.

Resolved. On June 3rd at around 6am ET, Google said the issue is resolved:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz 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. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.