Over the past month, WebmasterWorld has been getting reports in this forum and in our Updates thread, of members encountering ongoing Google indexing problems, GSC page loading problems, dropped pages, missing home pages, cache date problems, etc... and, subsequently, problems related to the Google Search Console coverage report. Many members have not known of Google problems, and assume they've had site problems (which we can't rule out).
Official Google acknowledgements of some of the problems had been discussed in Twitter and collated and reported by Barry Schwartz, both in seroundtable and searchengineland... and we've discussed them in our dedicated thread, beginning April 5, 2019...
Reports of Google Dropping Pages Out of Index... possibly a bug? April 5, 2019 https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4941198.htm [webmasterworld.com]
Google's initial estimates of a fix in a matter of hours extended into days. I should note that graphs I've seen posted by members here seem to suggest that indexing problems started in very late March (around 3/28); but, considering the nature of problems that evolved, it's very possible that the graphs were displaying multiple problems... In addition to an indexing problem, Google started showing a GSC reporting problem in mid-April, which bacame apparent to Google as the indexing problem was resolved.
Google's "official" reports were on Twitter, relayed by Barry and SER, with the highlights reported on our thread as noted. Several key updates on April 15th stated that though Google had fixed the indexing bug, it was now dealing with a reporting bug, perhaps inherited from the indexing bug...
...now causing issues within Google Search Console. The coverage and enhancement reports, as well as the URL Inspection tool are all impacted according to Google.
I've been following the two twitter feeds involved, but have seen no substantial updates since mid-month.
Worth noting that problems like the cache date not updating, which several have reported, are not meaningful. John Mu has been emphasizing the unimportance of cache dates for a while.
Additionally, there have been many user reports that the GSC Add URL Tool was not adding URLs as expected. These are difficult to interpret without knowing more about the situation. Over the past year, Google has imposed heavy limitations on the use of this tool, related to quality of material submitted, historical usage patterns, etc, in an effort to cut down on spam. It's hard to tell whether users complaining were encountering this intentional limitation, or whether they've been seeing reporting problems, or both.
In any event, there's been no update in the Pages Dropping bug thread, and no one new thread to indicate what's (not been) happening. I don't mean to belittle the Google programmers, btw, who are probably as good as they get. It's an incredibly complex system, and if there's a recursion error (I am not a search engineer, so this is conjecture), it might take a while to fix.
Barry's latest article confirms that current status is still a mystery....
Google Search Console Coverage Report Delayed 16 Days & Counting Apr 23, 2019 - by Barry Schwartz [
seroundtable.com...]
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....
As I catch up with things, I'm going to lock several of those threads and refer them to this discussion.
