Google’s indexing issues are resolved

Google’s indexing issues are resolved and Google is once again able to both crawl, index and rank fresh new content within minutes. Google has now officially confirmed this and our tests seem to show that this is the case.

What happened. Yesterday, in the early morning hours, Google stopped showing fresh content in its search results. If you filtered the news or web search results for content from sites that published content frequently, it would only show you content from before around 3am ET on August 8th. This was similar to the indexing issues from this past May.

Google confirmed. Google has now confirmed this is resolved, this story has been updated to reflect so. Here is Google’s confirmation:

Resolved. Now, if you filter content from news sites you will see Google showing content from within minutes of the content being published. I was able to test this out on my personal blog and Google indexed the content within minutes.

Here is a screen shot of Google indexing a story I wrote around 7:20am this morning and displaying it in the search results minutes later:

Google thinks so too. John Mueller from Google thinks it is resolved as well. John responded to my tweet saying “We’re still waiting for some final confirmations, but I think things are looking good now.”

Why it matters. If you saw a dip in your Google traffic yesterday, and a lot of your traffic generally comes from new content, then you may have seen a drop in your Google News, Google Discover and other Google traffic sources. Your Google Search Console performance reports may reflect the indexing issue as well.

The issue seemed to have occurred between around 3:00 a.m. ET on August 8th through around 3:00 a.m. ET on August 9th. But again, we are waiting for an official response from Google on the specifics of the issue.

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.