Google Search Console reported pages as being indexed when they were not indexed

Google said there was a bug with its coverage report in Search Console where Google reported pages as being indexed, when in fact, they were not indexed by Google Search. Google said this “affected many properties” and thus, you should probably double-check your coverage reports for the sites you manage over the next few days.

The announcement. Google wrote “Today we fixed a Search Console issue that affected many properties: we were reporting pages that are not indexed as being indexed. As a consequence, you might see a drop in your indexed pages in the Index Coverage report.”

Here is the tweet:

What to do. For now, you should probably add to your calendar to recheck the coverage report within Google Search Console to see if your indexed versus not indexed pages have changed in any significant manner.

Google has annotated the report, but you need to check back daily to see if you notice any major changes in the index saturation of your site’s pages in Google Search:

Why we care. If you provide reports to clients or stakeholders on the index versus not indexed pages on a site, then you will want to make sure to annotate your reports for clients. Hopefully, this does not add to any stress you already have with your SEO job.

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 can be followed on Twitter here.