I was asked by someone on Twitter last week if Google is more buggier than normal these days, with the indexing bugs, Search Console issues, cache date issues, mobile-friendly and rich recipes, manual actions bug and the list goes on and on for April. So I flipped the question over to John Mueller of Google and he said "I wouldn't say it's more often."
I asked John about this at the 8:58 mark into the hangout from yesterday and he said he wouldn't classify the recent bugs as unusually more than previous months but the bug itself was "a big big bug there which took a quite some time to resolve." Plus with the transparency in Search Console, he said most site owners noticed it.
Here is the Q&A:
Barry: Somebody asked me online if the bugs on Google are more than usual or are you guys being more transparent than usual?
John: I wouldn't say it's more often but we definitely ran into a big big bug there which took a quite some time to resolve. And because that's very visible to to site owners in particular through Search Console that's something that’s important for us to tell people about.
I think for the most part people in the normal search results didn't see that effect that strongly but definitely site owners when you're looking in Search Console where you see the details of how the indexing is happening how the reports are being updated you definitely see these things fairly clearly.
And if we don't talk about them externally then people will be confused and wondering like is there something that they're doing wrong that they need to fix. And sometimes we see situations where people are confused and they think they should be doing something differently they end up breaking things even worse then actually they might be otherwise.
So that's part of the reason why we're trying to be as transparent as possible about these types of issues here.
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Here is the video embed at that start time:
Here is how Kim Doughty summed it up:
From @rustybrick: "Is google having more bugs than usual or are you just being more transparent about it?"@JohnMu wouldn't necessarily say bugs are happening more often, this one just happened to be very visible to webmasters and SEOs, and so it is important to be transparent
— Kim Doughty (@Howdy_Doughty) May 1, 2019
Barry just asked John in the help hangout if there is a reason why Google is having a lot of bugs lately.
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) May 1, 2019
No clear answer, but John admitted the deindexing bug was a big one.https://t.co/Z026awND89
Forum discussion at Twitter.
