Today, anything that isn’t on Google Search practically doesn’t exist. Yes, there are plenty of other search engines on the Internet, including Microsoft’s Bing, but Google is for all intents and purposes the Coke of the search engine world. Who wants to drink Pepsi when you can drink something that tastes better? (No one paid me to say this, let’s be clear).
But for something to exist in Google, the company must first index it, a process that adds or updates the search results of all the websites you see every day. But even the great and almighty Google is not spared from occasional glitches.
During the night of October 6, several news publishers reported that their content was not being indexed correctly in Google, something that greatly affected the visibility of their articles on the Internet. Shortly after, Google confirmed that there was indeed a problem with the indexing of content.
“There is an issue that is delaying the indexing of recently published content,” Danny Sullivan, a liaison agent in Google’s Search division, explained on Twitter. “We are working to identify the root cause. You can track progress here in the Google Search status dashboard.”
Throughout the night, several websites continued to experience problems with the new content they published. According to Search Engine Land, the problem did not lie in the indexing, but rather in the search service itself, since certain links to new articles that did not appear in the search did appear as indexed by Google Search Console.
Fortunately, the problem is now fixed, and content posted as of this morning should appear without issue in Google search. “On October 5, 2023 we encountered an issue that slowed the indexing of some content from 10:30am to 4:20pm PDT. We believe this issue is now resolved,” stated the Google Search Console Twitter account at 8 a.m. today, October 6.
