Google confirms bug with crawl stats in ‘time spent downloading a page’ Search Console report

No need to worry, the Google Search Console crawl stats drop last week was indeed a bug.

Chat with SearchBot

Spider Web2 Ss 1920

Google’s webmaster trends analyst John Mueller has confirmed on Twitter that there is a reporting glitch with the crawl stats “time spent downloading a page” report in the Google Search Console for the dates February 20 and 21.

There was a massive dip in the number being reported on those two days, but that dip was just a glitch in the reporting. It does not reflect actual crawling or search rankings.

Here is a screen shot that illustrates the glitch:

Crawl Stat Drop Bug

Mueller wrote:

If you’re seeing a weird drop in the Crawl Stats in Search Console for a day last week, that’s a reporting issue on our side which you can ignore. Sorry for the confusion & hope your week otherwise starts off great!

Here is the tweet:


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is 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 can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.