Indexing Bugs Confirmed by Google - May 22 & May 24 2019

Google is having a torrid few days with two different indexing bugs causing significant volatility in the Search Result Pages. The bugs prevent new content from appearing in the search index.

Indexing of new content matters a lot to websites that rely on getting their content in Google promptly.

This bug is particularly hard-hitting for news-based websites or those sites that rely on fresh content to drive traffic.

New Content Indexing bug - 22nd May

On the 22nd of May, Google confirmed an issue with indexing new content:

Google confirmed that the issue was resolved on the 23rd of May 2019:

Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, said that he did not expect any data loss in the search console as a result. He implies that there would not be any data to lose because the page was not in Google.

New Content Indexing bug - 24th May

On the 24th of May, Google had another new indexing issue:

Google confirmed that the issue was resolved some two and a half days later:

Danny Sullivan clarified that the fix usually happens much earlier than they post:

To be clearer, we’ve tended to update those things when we have an issue fully resolved. But we often get the issues clearing up before then. You can do some searches directly yourself and see there’s lots of fresh content back in as usual. But we want to be 100% when we post.

The SERP Trackers

All the SERP trackers show significant volatility during the bug.

I am assuming that this is solely down to the indexing issues. I have read nothing around the web to suggest otherwise.

SEMrush Sensor:

Rank Risk Index:

MozCast:

Advanced Web Ranking:

SERPmetrics:

Accuranker:

What does the SEO community say?

There has been a mixed response from other publishers about whether the indexing bug could have caused so much volatility, as it only affected new pages.

One comment in the Webmaster World forum reinforces my view that the volatility was caused by a bug:

Yeah, the change only lasted for 24hrs. They might just be testing something or are going to roll out whatever they did very soon.

The traffic increase seen by one webmaster was positive and lasted for the period of the bug.

Many of the other comments were positive:

Seems like there was a big algo change last night, started ranking for a lot of net new keywords

i noticed some big spikes last night for a few hours also and the previous 2 days have seen me have a bit better traffic than since the last update (that google says didnt happen but I don’t believe!). So something might be happening but no idea what

If this was truly an update I would have expected more comments complaining about falls in traffic.