Google Fixed Another Indexing Issue With Fresh Content

Yesterday at Search Engine Land I reported Google was having indexing issues. Google then ultimately confirmed the issue as “slight delays in indexing fresh content.” I reported the issue around 2:30pm yesterday, this was after hours of there being an issue and by 8:30pm Google fixed the issue.

Here is my first tweet:

@dannysullivan @JohnMu Google slow to index (or show indexed) pages in search and news again? I see examples on my sites where stories are not showing up but WSJ and NYTimes also not showing recent stories pic.twitter.com/AMJWcUlMOp

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 16, 2019

Danny Sullivan from Google said he will look into it:

These seem fine to me. It might be that the filtering options aren’t working correctly even though the content is there. We’ll look at it. pic.twitter.com/A3u8bVlkXN

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 16, 2019

Then I wrote about it at Search Engine Land with more screen shots and examples of indexing issues:

Google may be having issues showing new content againhttps://t.co/0DrFf3Mkfh pic.twitter.com/J61vZh6lzc

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 16, 2019

Then Google confirmed an issue hours after it started:

We’re aware of an issue that may be causing slight delays in indexing fresh content. We’re looking into it and will update when it is clear.

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) October 16, 2019

Then Google confirmed it was fixed:

The issue is now resolved. Thank you for all the feedback here on Twitter and other channels!

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) October 17, 2019

I estimate the indexing issues lasted about 8 hours or so yesterday.

As you know, Google has had many indexing issues this year and even posted some sort of explanation about it. I doubt I was the first to alert them to these issues but who knows…

Forum discussion at Twitter