Reports of Google Dropping Pages Out of Index... possibly a bug?

"Main search results now fully fixed," per Google, but new problems in GSC Reporting.

[Robert Charlton]

Just a note that Barry, on seroundtable, is citing widespread reports of Google dropping pages out of the search index; and though there's no official word yet from Google, it appears to be a bug....
[webmasterworld.com...]

Google Is Dropping Pages Out Of The Search Index; A Bug?
Apr 5, 2019 • 7:48 am
by Barry Schwartz
[seroundtable.com...]

Something weird is going on with the Google search index. I am seeing wide spread reports of SEOs and webmasters complaining that their URLs and web pages are being removed from the Google Index. Lots of folks are noticing that a nice percentage of their web sites are no longer coming up for a site command or showing in Search Console as being indexed.

Sources include our April Google Updates and SERPs thread [webmasterworld.com...]

[tangor]

@Zalman ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Search and reload has always given different results ... to me what is returned is whatever is "top" at the instant of each search and it always seems to be changing. I will admit that what you described is a bit different than the past!

(Bing is rather consistent in same scenario, then again it is not the largest se on the planet)

[JesterMagic]

So our pages seem to have all returned to the index but our traffic is about 5% less than it should be before the indexing issue. Anyone else see this?

During the index issue our site actually increased in traffic by about 10%. We lost pages in the index as well but I guess the ones still in it moved up in the results enough to make up for the difference and then some.

[BangkokBaby]

@JesterMagic,

I have something similar, I'm around 10% down, but I wasn't hit on April 7/8th like the others, but on the 12th.

My site seems to be getting more traffic today (Tuesday) than Monday which is never normally the case. I'm hoping Google is re-learning each URLs PA and it will be back to normal, but we shall see.

[NickMNS]

@Zalman

So are these other URL's indexed or not?

If the page shows up then it must be in the index, because it can't show up if it is not in the index. The "site:" operators is a means of surfacing your specific content. The issue with this operator is that it may not surface your content despite the fact that it is indexed. So you can only be sure that a pages is indexed (by seeing it in the results) but you can not know for sure whether a page is not indexed. Moreover, the results are inconsistent and change, so seeing a specific page one day and then not seeing it the next, does not allow you to conclude that the page has disappeared from the index. Generally, once a page is added it is never removed.

Another trick to coax out more pages is to search using "site:" and another criteria eg: site:example.com blue widgets. Then you can vary the criteria to say "red widgets".

The most important thing to note is that just because a pages is indexed doesn't mean it will rank. So "site:" is not a good indicator of ranking. I said above that "once a page is added it is never removed". It may never be removed, but just because it is in the index does not mean that it will ever be seen in any search results.

[bluetoothbird]

Posting first time...

I am webmaster for a large site managing over 120M+ URLs. They are mostly user-generated content and 90%+ our traffic comes via organic search.
Our traffic started declining from 8th April but has seen heavier drops from the 12th April.

We do work with GSC APIs to record the indexation data internally and the data did record a significant 58% drop of our indexed pages for one of the page types on 8th April.
Although Google has confirmed about fixing the index bug, I am still trying to get a concrete confirmation or insight for our site
Our GSC sitemap coverage is not updated since 7th April which has made it difficult to understand what our current indexation looks like.

Any suggestions?

[FranticFish]

"site:" is not a good indicator of ranking

It's not even a solid indicator of indexing last I checked. First it used to work fine on its own, now you can try combining site: and inurl: (with a few CAPTCHAS on the way of course)

Any suggestions?

I used to find the 'info:' query helpful for verifying single urls, but Google removed it last year.

If the pages in question have common hierarchy / folder structure then you could use inurl: which I believe / hope still works.

If there are single very important pages (I know you say it's a megasite but perhaps there are certain 'hub pages' that are particularly important when distributing PR) then searching for a unique short phrase in speechmarks would help. If your site carries more generic information (say addresses or business names) then search for that information (again in speechmarks) plus your domain name.

[tangor]

@bluetoothbird ... Welcome to Webmasterworld! Glad to have you on the forum!

G is struggling to update the recent "bug" errors. It will take more than a few minutes to reset the serps (think weeks!). That said, most of g's algo changes have generally resulted in "less" for webmasters. G's fine-tuning will continue, but don't expect a complete recovery. Speaking historically! One can always hope!

[Robert Charlton]

While we mentioned the GSC Reporting Bug, on about April 15, we haven't given it a new discussion, which (prompted by the number of questions I'm continuing to see), I think is needed. I'm going to lock this thread and continue here....

April 2019 Google indexing & reporting bugs continue... It's not you!
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4943488.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Quoting Barry Schwartz's latest status report, as noted in the new thread...

It is now 16 days and counting since the Google Search Console Coverage report has been updated. Two-weeks later than the normal two-day delay and there is no end in sight...// Google is aware of the issue, they intentionally paused the reports because of the indexing issues that were supposedly fixed. But that was fixed 12 days ago and the reporting is still not working in Google Search Console.

...