Google Search Console reports back on track after multi-week delay

Earlier this month, we reported that Google’s de-indexing bug caused delays for Search Console reports. Well, after a three-week delay, Google has finally updated the reports that were impacted by this bug.

If you login to Google Search Console and go to the Coverage report or any of the Enhancement reports, you will see the normal two-day delay, as opposed to it being stuck at around April 7th.

Back to normal reporting delay. Here is a screen shot showing the coverage report now shows me through April 27th, which is the normal two-day delay for this report:

What Google has said. Google has yet to officially confirm that this reports are up-to-date, the @googlewmc channel does not yet have an update. The latest is from April 25th, in which Google said it is still working on a fix for this bug:

We’re also still working on resolving the issue with fresh data and correct live status reporting in Search Console. We’ll update our previous thread on that, when this is done. https://t.co/DVYlHx37tW

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 25, 2019

Here is the original notice from Google back on April 15th:

Search Console is still recovering from the indexing issue we reported on last week. As a result, index coverage and enhancement reports were not updated recently & URL Inspector might not reflect live status, at the moment.

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 15, 2019

Not uncommon. The truth is, it is not uncommon for Google Search Console to have reporting delays, more than the normal two or three day delay. We have seen it fairly often but since it coincided with the indexing bug, it was more of a concern because SEOs, webmasters, site owners were unable to see how much they were impacted by this bug.

Why we care. Having fairly up-to-date data about how well your site is performing in Google is critical for an SEO. We know many SEOs had to communicate delayed reporting to their customers. In addition, since there was this de-indexing bug, SEOs and site owners were having a hard time understanding if any traffic loses were due to the bug or to other factors that they can try to work on and fix.

Now you can go ahead and investigate how the coverage report, your index saturation in Google, may have impacted your Google organic search traffic.

Postscript. Google has confirmed that the main reports in Google Search Console are back on track, with the exception of the backlink report that “still needs some time to update.”