Google says de-indexing issue is fixed

Google announced Wednesday night that it has finally fixed de-indexing issue that has been affecting websites for a week.

Here is the tweet:

The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2019

More details. Google dropped pages inadvertently from its search index due starting on April 4. Three days later, Google said it had fixed the issue, only to say a day later that it was not fully resolved.

In a series of updates throughout the week, Google said it was still reprocessing pages and expected the issue to be fully resolved soon.

Why it matters. You may see a loss in traffic, a loss in revenues, sales, conversion and overall metrics during this period from Google search if you had pages drop out of the index.

It’s not clear what caused the issue (Google’s not saying) or how much of the index was affected. We just know it was substantial and took days to rectify. This episode did show that the Inspect URL and Submit to index feature in Google Search Console’s worked for those who resubmitted dropped URLs to the index.

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.