Just amazing, again, Google had an issue indexing news content last night. Ewdison Then, a publisher at SlashGear, Android Community and other places notified me on Twitter of this showing screen shots of CNN, Fox News, WSJ, and Engadget all showing zero new content in Google Search at around 6:50pm.
Here are those screen shots:
@JohnMu @rustybrick @searchliaison Checked for new stories on cnn, wsj, fox, and etc, verified they run stories within this 1 hour but none were index. Big backend work? #Google @googlewmc pic.twitter.com/gljuQfw7ky
— Ewdison Then (@ewdi) September 28, 2020
45 minutes later Google confirmed the issue on Twitter saying "We have an issue with indexing new News content, at the moment. It began around 4pm PT. We’re working to correct and will update when this is resolved."
We have an issue with indexing new News content, at the moment. It began around 4pm PT. We’re working to correct and will update when this is resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 28, 2020
By the time I came back online after Yom Kippur the issue was already resolved and then a few hours later Google confirmed the issue was resolved:
The News indexing issue has now been resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 29, 2020
So if you see traffic issues with your publisher clients around 6:45pm to 8:45pm ET last night, September 28th, that is why.
Google has been having a lot of visible bugs recently, not just with ongoing indexing issues (which we covered tons of times already) but ongoing canonical issues and even worse (although that last one isn't really a bug but an exploit.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
