Google: De-indexing problem now fixed, result of ‘technical issue’

Many SEOs and site owners reported seeing pages drop out of the Google search index over the last couple of days. The issues were visible in Google Search Console and when using the site command in a browser.

Technical issue reported fixed. It was apparently the result of a technical issue at Google, according to Google’s John Mueller. Mueller said it has been resolved.

“We had a technical issue on our side for a while there,”  Mueller tweeted early Saturday morning. He said the problem should now be resolved and “the affected URLs reprocessed.”

Sorry — We had a technical issue on our side for a while there — this should be resolved in the meantime, and the affected URLs reprocessed. It's good to see that the Inspect URL tool is also useful for these kinds of cases though!

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) April 6, 2019

It’s not clear what the technical issue was, and Mueller said it’s “unlikely” Google will tell us more. Those who noticed problems should now be seeing their pages back in the index, though there are some reports of ongoing de-indexing issues.

URL inspection tool. “It’s good to see that the Inspect URL tool is also useful for these cases though!,” Mueller added.

The URL inspection tool is available in the new Google Search Console. It allows you to check a specific URL on your website to see the status it in the Google search index. It provides crawl, index, and serving information about the page, directly from the Google index. You’ll see the last crawl date, the status of that last crawl, any crawling or indexing errors and the canonical URL for that page. It will show if the page was successfully indexed, any AMP errors, structured data errors and indexing issues.

Why you should care. It’s a reminder that site owners are at the mercy of engineering bugs, glitches and other “technical issues” and incentive to routinely check Search Console reports to spot problems. This issue appears to have affected sites on April 4 and 5, and sites should no longer be experiencing de-indexing problems as a result of this problem on Google’s end.

This article has been updated with reports of continued issues.

Postscript: Google has acknowledged that the issue is not yet fully resolved, please see our updated story over here.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.