Last night at around 8pm ET while in a taxi back to my home from the airport, I wrote on Search Engine Land that Google's indexing issue was back. Google then confirmed a new indexing issue on Twitter at around 2:20pm ET the following morning. But they said this issue is different and not related to the one from Wednesday morning.
Here is Google's tweet:
We're looking into a new indexing issue that started escalating 6 hours ago. The issue is unrelated to yesterday's outage and we're working hard to resolve it. We'll update this thread when we can provide more information.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) May 24, 2019
What is this issue? Hard to say.
The last issue seemed to be related to Google having a back log of URLs they needed to get into the index. This one seemed similar, at least based on my earlier tests last night. But as time went on, it did seem different.
I don't have inside intel - so hard for me to know how this issue is different than the previous one. Hopefully Google will share an update.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update at 2pm: Danny Sullivan implies this is almost fixed and did clarify that this issue is about fresh content but the cause of the issue is different from the previous fresh content indexing issue:
To be clearer, we've tended to update those things when we have an issue fully resolved. But we often get the issues clearing up before then. You can do some searches directly yourself and see there's lots of fresh content back in as usual. But we want to be 100% when we post.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 24, 2019
I believe it's related to picking up fresh content because as you saw from the reports, this we're time restricted. But it's a different issue that's causing that versus the one earlier this week.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 24, 2019
Update on May 26 at 12:16pm: Google has confirmed this specific issue has been resolved after about 2-3 days of it first being reported.
This issue has been resolved -- thanks for your patience!
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) May 26, 2019
Wishing you all a great week.
