In the past ten days, several reports in the SEO community suggested that Google was de-indexing web pages.
Also, site owners noted that the search engine had dropped homepages from its index. So, several users took to Twitter to ask Google’s John Mueller about a possible indexing outage.
However, Mueller did not confirm any issue. Instead, the Webmaster Trends Analyst asked the site owners to provide more details.
“I’m not aware of any issues, and without URLs, it’s hard to say,” He said. “Do you have a thread in the help forum with the details?”
Despite Mueller’s response, spikes in SEO tools — such as SEMrush Sensor — suggested some changes in Google Search. Besides, more complaints around indexing issues surfaced on the internet.
For example, the Search Engine Journal reported experiencing multiple dropped URLs. However, the site quickly pointed out that submitting the URLs back via Google Search Console seemed to solve the problem.
Then, there’s the canonicalization issue.
According to reports, there seems to be a problem with how Google handled web pages that were cited or copied by other pages. As a result, the search results are not showing the original web page.
So, what went wrong?
Google Explains two Indexing Issues Affecting Search Results.
Earlier today, Google’s Danny Sullivan confirmed that the search engine is working to resolve two separate indexing outages. These include mobile indexing issues and problems with canonicalization.
For the mobile indexing problem, the search engine might inadvertently drop a page that was previously indexed. The canonicalization outage, on the other hand, refers to how Google detects and handles duplicate content.
According to Sullivan, if the canonical issue is involved, Google’s URL detector may misinterpret an original content as a duplicate. So, it would select a canonical that’s different from it.
Google’s announcement reads:
“There’s no action to take with these issues on the part of site owners. We apologize for the issues here and are working rapidly to resolve them. We’ll update this thread as each is corrected.”
We’ll update the article as more information becomes available.
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