Google may be having some issues indexing and/or serving new content in Google Search. There have been reports from various news publishers about these issues starting at about 2pm ET today.
Google statement. Google’s Search Liaison Danny Sullivan said, “I’ve heard some sporadic reports, and we’re checking on these.”
40 minutes after publishing this article, Google confirmed the issue as an indexing issue with new content. Google wrote, “There’s an ongoing issue that’s delaying the indexing of newly published content. We’re working on identifying the root cause. You can monitor progress here on the Google Search Status Dashboard.”
Reports. Edward Hyatt, the Director of Newsroom SEO at the Wall Street Journal, wrote, “Indexing of new content in Search looks like it dropped around 2-3pm.”
We will continue to monitor the potential issues and keep you posted in this story if there are any confirmed issues with Google Search index and serving.
I am seeing content being indexed and served by Google Search in the past hour or so, but Edward Hyatt added, “t’s still crawling existing content but not new URLS unfortunately..”
A site command for content within the past hour does show this:
However, as I continue to monitor this query, it does seem like newer content is coming in and out of these search results. I am also monitoring other news sites that continuously publish content and I am seeing similar issues. So it does appear that there are some issues with Google serving new content.
Why we care. If you are publishing new content since 2pm ET you may be seeing less traffic from Google Search. It is unclear how widespread the issues are and how much this is impacting publishers.
Postscript. There does seem to be issues with Google Search surfacing new content but it does not seem to be indexing-related but rather serving-related. Here is a new piece of content that shows as being indexed by Google Search Console:
But it is not currently being served by Google Search:
But Google has said this is a confirmed indexing issue with new content.
