It’s been reported that a Google bug is causing the removal of pages from the search index. Starting on Thursday 4th April, Google confirmed the bug on Saturday 6th, and as of the time of writing, (11th April), it is yet to be fully resolved.
Google IS Dropping Pages Out Of The Search Index; A Bug? – https://t.co/y9PLGmkDVI. We are seeing some examples of this atm.
— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) April 5, 2019
Sites are seeing web pages being omitted from their index, thus not showing up in Google search results. This could have a huge impact for these websites, resulting in less traffic and therefore less e-commerce check outs, leads and conversions.
On Twitter, people have been asking what the issue is/was, but Google seemed to be avoiding the question:
That's unlikely :-). Our internal systems are pretty unique.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) April 6, 2019
Come Monday morning, the issue was still not resolved:
We are still resolving the indexing issue that has impacted some pages. We've made further improvements and hope any remaining issues will be done within the next 12-24 hours. Will provide a further update when the issue is fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 8, 2019
Google did also confirm that, while you can use the URL inspection tool to expedite pages, everything will be fixed by Google and we don’t necessarily need to do anything:
Yep! It looks like it's still catching up, things will settle back like before automatically. People seem to have success with the submit-to-indexing tool, if there's something specific you're missing and don't want to wait. (I know, nobody wants to wait :))
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) April 7, 2019
Hopefully, this issue will be resolved soon – has your site been affected?
This is not the first Google bug we’ve seen – a few months ago, a bug caused 14 Ads to show on mobile SERPs.
UPDATE: The issue has been resolved:
The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2019