Google says de-indexing issue is fixed

After six days of working to fix the indexing bug, Google claims to have solved the problem but did not elaborate on what exactly went wrong.

More details. Google dropped pages inadvertently from its search index due starting on April 4. Three days later, Google said it had fixed the issue, only to say a day later that it was not fully resolved.

In a series of updates throughout the week, Google said it was still reprocessing pages and expected the issue to be fully resolved soon.

Why it matters. You may see a loss in traffic, a loss in revenues, sales, conversion and overall metrics during this period from Google search if you had pages drop out of the index.

It’s not clear what caused the issue (Google’s not saying) or how much of the index was affected. We just know it was substantial and took days to rectify. This episode did show that the Inspect URL and Submit to index feature in Google Search Console’s worked for those who resubmitted dropped URLs to the index.

Can we isolate deindexing flux?

Google's own tools can help us check whether a page is indexed, but doing this at scale is difficult, and once an event has passed, we no longer have good access to historical data. What if we could isolate a set of URLs, though, that we could reasonably expect to be stable over time? Could we use that set to detect unusual patterns?

Across the month of February, the MozCast 10K daily tracking set had 149,043 unique URLs ranking on page one. I reduced that to a subset of URLs with the following properties:

1. They appeared on page one every day in February (28 total times)
2. The query did not have sitelinks (i.e. no clear dominant intent)
3. The URL ranked at position #5 or better