Google said “there’s an ongoing issue with our serving system in Google Search that’s affecting a small number of sites,” on Twitter this morning. Google said the company is working on resolving the issue and will report back when it is resolved.
The tweet. Here is the tweet so you can read it yourself:
What is the issue. At around 4:30am there were reports, which I covered on the Search Engine Roundtable, that Google was having issues indexing or crawling or serving new content from both major and smaller publishers. I showed screenshots of Google not showing new content from publishers like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and niche publishers like TechCrunch and The Verge.
Here are some of those screenshots:
But then at around 6:30am ET, it seemed like Google fixed the issue. Well, it seems Google did not fully resolve the issue because now the company officially confirmed the issue on Twitter.
Smaller publishers? If I look at what Google indexed on my personal site in the past 24 hours, it shows a story from yesterday, that was published before Google had these serving issues. And a story that I manually pushed to Google using the request indexing issue in Search Console. It does not show the several other stories I published this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable.
But even now, if I do a site command for wsj.com and filter to show stories in the past hour, I am still seeing the issue, after I thought it was resolved:
Why we care. If you are having issues with Google now showing your recent content in Google Search today, December 16, 2021, do not worry, it seems to be an issue on Google’s end. Google is working on resolving it.
Until then, I guess try to use Google Search Console to push your content into Google Search and hope that works. Also it is a time to remind you that having other channels to drive traffic to your site, like social media, email marketing, direct traffic and other means is important.
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About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.
