Google fixed a bug that prevented some searchers from viewing some search results over the past five or so days. It seemed to impact URLs that contained + signs in them or other special characters. Google confirmed the issue and fixed it as of yesterday.
Wellness Heaven posted about the issue on Twitter and showed this video below of how when a user using Safari tried to click on their URL in the Google search results, nothing happened. There was a bug with the search results interface that prevented searchers from clicking on some URLs. This obviously led to a decrease in traffic and thus revenues for this company and others in the same position.
Here is the video of it in action:
Safari Google „+“ sign bug in action pic.twitter.com/Km85DdyUzL
— Wellness Heaven (@wellness7) October 1, 2018
You can see this Google Analytics chart showing how much traffic the site lost because of the bug:
It was a coding issue, a JavaScript bug, with Safari (Mac), Firefox (Win and Mac), IE (Win), Edge (Win), the Google search results, for URLs with + signs in them or maybe other special characters:
this is the screenshot of the bug, in case you cannot access it. the "+" sign bug is now confirmed on Firefox (mac / win), Safari (mac) and IE (win). just try to click on this result: https://t.co/iY4qO8o0zU pic.twitter.com/Uwz7857dy5
— Wellness Heaven (@wellness7) October 1, 2018
There was another similar complaint about this in the Google Webmaster Help forums but that site didn't have + signs in the URLs, but had other issues.
Google confirmed the issue and said it had nothing to do with ranking or the Google Birthday update.
We're aware of the bug. There is a fix underway for it. I don't have an ETA, but we are working to restore ASAP.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 2, 2018
This is a bug we'll fix, don't worry :). "+"s are sometimes awkward in URLs, but they should work regardless.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 1, 2018
Yeah, this is an unfortunate UI bug, not related to crawling, indexing, or ranking.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 1, 2018
But the result of traffic loss the past five days or so is something those impacted cannot get back.
I analyzed landing pages with or without "+" in URL, filtered for the segment "Chrome", where this bug is not present. Thus, this data is not skewed by blocked clicks. "Normal" URLs only lost -6% organic traffic by the 9/27 update, while "+" URLs were diminished by -29%! pic.twitter.com/7yfUTCqiGU
— Wellness Heaven (@wellness7) October 2, 2018
It is not common for Google to have such bugs, but they are human, they do make mistakes and we've seen many bugs over the past 15 years of covering Google.
Forum discussion at Twitter and Google Webmaster Help.
