Google is experiencing temporary indexing issues

Google is not perfect—their search engine and algorithms don’t work optimally 24/7, and the risk of problems increases whenever they need to change or adjust something (which they do all the time). Now we finally have clear answers on what has happened in the search results and Google Search Console over the past few weeks.

SEO specialists and site owners around the world began noticing indexing issues around the end of September but couldn’t say for sure whether it was a problem or possibly a new core update that Google hadn’t announced.

Now Google has officially confirmed that around September 22–23, indexing problems did indeed occur. Not just one, but two different issues.

What happened?

Google Search Liaison announced on Twitter that they are dealing with two different types of problems they are trying to fix: mobile indexing and how Google discovers and handles pages using canonicals.

Site owners have reported that their mobile pages are not being indexed or have disappeared from the index, and this could be the reason. The second issue involves Google selecting a canonical and linking to a page that has nothing to do with the original page. When Google assigns a canonical to a different page, the original risks dropping out of the index because Google believes it’s a completely different site that is important and should rank.

So for site owners who have seen strange indexing messages in Google Search Console or noticed that pages previously appearing in search results are now missing, this may be the explanation.

What can you do?

Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about it—we simply have to wait until Google resolves the problem. They themselves say it may take several days before everything is fully restored.

On October 6, Google announced that they had restored about 50% of all URLs affected (a total of around 0.2% of their mobile index) as well as 25% of the URLs affected due to canonicals (in total about 0.002% of all canonicals Google has listed).