Google: Indexing Issues Resolved, No More Status Updates

On Oct 21, 2020

Google said last night that the indexing issues are essentially fully resolved outside of some edge cases. Google said 99% of the indexing issues were resolved as of Wednesday, October 14, 2020. There are some edge cases that will be resolved within “a week or two,” Google said.

Here is the tweet:

Final update: the canonical issue was effectively resolved last Wednesday, with about 99% of the URLs restored. We expect the remaining edge cases will be restored within a week or two.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 19, 2020

I am not going to go through all the issues again, I wrote it up in detail over here – Techthere. But we knew there were weird issues with indexing and how Google handled canonicals in September and Google did admit it and worked to fix it. It took a while and it is not yet fully resolved (i.e. the edge cases) but it should be mostly resolved now.

Here is Google’s communication on this matter:

If a previously indexed page has gone, it might be the mobile-indexing issue, where we’re failing to select any page at all to index. If the canonical issue is involved, URL Inspector may show the URL as a duplicate & the Google-selected canonical will be different from it….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020

Update: it may take days to fully resolve both these issues completely, but we have restored many URLs already and are working quickly to process more. In particular….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 3, 2020

The mobile-indexing issue impacted roughly about 0.2% of our index, beginning in early September but really spiking from around the middle of this week through late yesterday. We’ve since restored about 1/4 of those URLs & keep reprocessing more.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 3, 2020

Update: the mobile indexing was effectively resolved yesterday, with about 99% of the URLs restored. Work on the canonical issue continues, with about 55% of impacted URLs restored.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 9, 2020

And then that final update posted above.

It seems like most SEOs do feel the indexing issues are resolved for them but there are some complaints, as always around indexing.

The ongoing SEO forum threads seem relatively calm about indexing issues right now.

I wonder how much loss revenue and business this caused for some businesses. We literally reported these issues back on September 23rd and Google said the issues started in early September. That is over a month of issues…

Forum discussion at Twitter.