Google Search resolves indexing bug that lasted several hours
A Google bug has prevented the indexing of new content for the past several hours, impacting large and smaller publishers. (Update: The bug is now resolved, read on for details.)
The issue seemed to start around 5 p.m. ET, when Google Search was not showing most of the new content that content creators were publishing to their websites.
What are we seeing. Sites as large as AP News, CNN, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fox News, CNBC and even small sites like the Search Engine Roundtable, reported issues with new content not being shown in the Google Search results.
This can be a Google Search bug with indexing or serving or maybe some rendering issue with the Google Search interface.
Here are some examples of the Google Search results filtered to show content published in the past hour from some of these publications that publish dozens of stories per hour. You can see some sites have no pages shown for content published on them in the past hour, some have one, some have three and so on:
Checking Google Search tools. So when I was debugging this after covering this issue a few hours ago on Search Engine Roundtable, I noticed the story I published on this news was not indexed by Google and is still not indexed a few hours later. The content published on this site normally gets indexed within minutes by Google Search.
Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool still says the URL is not indexed, hours later:
When I search for the story headline, filter by content published recently, or even search by the URL of the story, Google Search is not returning it.
No word from Google yet. I reached out to Google but have still not heard back on this issue as of publishing. Google has not published an issue update on the Google Search Status dashboard – I suspect they will eventually.
Update: Google updated the dashboard to confirm the indexing issue and a Google spokesperson sent us this statement:
- “There was an issue that was briefly affecting indexing in Google Search. We’ve addressed the issue and indexing should be working normally now.”
Spam update the issue. Is it possible that the June 2024 spam update broke Google Search? That is hard to say, and it is just speculation. But we know with the last core update, Elizabeth Tucker from Google said their main goal was to ensure that algorithm update did not break Google. We also know that sometimes Google experiments cause issues in Google Search.
Others having issues. I posted the news on social media, including X and there are a lot of folks noticing this issue now. Just click through to my post on X and you’ll see a lot of the replies and quotes:
Google Search indexing issue – not seeing new content being indexed (or served) for sites as large as @WSJ @nytimes @cnnbrk @Forbes and others https://t.co/z0kL67HYQg cc @searchliaison @googlesearchc pic.twitter.com/dCJ6GG8PTO
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 20, 2024
Why we care. If you produce content, like a news publication, and notice a drop in Google traffic over the past several hours, this may be why. Hopefully, Google will fix it and reply with more details. Google clearly wants to ensure searchers can find the content, especially new content, that they are looking for.
Google confirmed the issue around 1 am ET. The story has been updated to reflect that.