Google: De-indexing problem now fixed, result of ‘technical issue’
Site owners who saw large percentages of pages no longer show as indexed in Google Search Console should now see the problem resolved.
Technical issue reported fixed. It was apparently the result of a technical issue at Google, according to Google’s John Mueller. Mueller said it has been resolved.
“We had a technical issue on our side for a while there,” Mueller tweeted early Saturday morning. He said the problem should now be resolved and “the affected URLs reprocessed.”
URL inspection tool. “It’s good to see that the Inspect URL tool is also useful for these cases though!,” Mueller added.
The URL inspection tool is available in the new Google Search Console. It allows you to check a specific URL on your website to see the status it in the Google search index. It provides crawl, index, and serving information about the page, directly from the Google index. You’ll see the last crawl date, the status of that last crawl, any crawling or indexing errors and the canonical URL for that page. It will show if the page was successfully indexed, any AMP errors, structured data errors and indexing issues.
Why you should care. It’s a reminder that site owners are at the mercy of engineering bugs, glitches and other “technical issues” and incentive to routinely check Search Console reports to spot problems. This issue appears to have affected sites on April 4 and 5, and sites should no longer be experiencing de-indexing problems as a result of this problem on Google’s end.
