Yesterday morning we reported that Google was having issues surfacing fresh content; possibly indexing issues. Then at around 3:30pm ET yesterday, Google confirmed the issue. This morning at 6:09am ET, Google has confirmed the issue has been resolved.
Google said this morning on Twitter "the indexing issues from yesterday have been resolved. Thank you for your patience."
Here are those tweets:
The indexing issues from yesterday have been resolved. Thank you for your patience.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 3, 2020
I wonder if this was just a backlog indexing issue that resolved itself or if it was something different. Your guess is as good as mine.
But it does appear that Google is indexing and showing fresh content normally again.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Gary Illyes from Google in a podcast released on July 2nd, said this was actually a crawling issue. He said crawling was happening so fast that it was overwhelming the indexing side. He said indexing was overwhelmed by the crawler. Google was not able to export the new documents to serving chars, so for the vast majority of sites, it was not able to get those pages in the index and serve up that new content.
This was alerted to Google early on because they have tools that look at Twitter for indexing issue reporting, that can find these issues earlier than some of their other dashboards use.
You can listen to this at the 11:50 mark into the video:
