Google Search Is Broken, Outages, Indexing Issues, Pages Missing & More

[djbaxter]

Google Search Is Broken, Outages, Indexing Issues, Pages Missing & More​

by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable
August 9, 2022

Last night, Google suffered a pretty big outage with Google Search that is still lingering through this morning. It seemed to be larger than just an outage because there are tons of complaints about indexing issues, pages dropping out of the index, and super poor quality and dated search results being shown in Google this morning.

The first report I saw of the outage was from 9to5Google last night at around 9:30 pm ET, I tweeted about it then:

There was a Google data center fire that seemed to have caused these issues. A Google spokesperson said "We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people onsite who are now being treated. The health and safety of all workers is our absolute top priority, and we are working closely with partners and local authorities to thoroughly investigate the situation and provide assistance as needed."

Those injured should be in our thoughts and prayers and have a speedy recovery.
....
But the outage seemed to have impacted more than just accessibility to Google.com and the Google Search results.

There are tons and tons of complaints about indexing issues and old pages that once ranked, not ranking anymore.

Google is aware and John Mueller of Google thinks things will soon start to fix itself as Google recovers.

Plus, the tracking tools don't know what to make of this outage and broken Google. Some charts are literally on fire and breaking through the X axis:

 

[greenfiend]

I'm still experiencing indexing issues the last several weeks since the July 15th report about it on SER. Any new or updated landing pages on our site were typically recrawled and indexed almost within a day. Lately, it's taken over a week at the longest. Not only that, pages that I changed the URL to, SERP currently indexes both our new URL and the old redirected URL. I know it'll get sorted out eventually, but it never took this long before.

 

[djbaxter]

I'm not sure this is related to some of the other issues reported here but all of a sudden I'm getting requests to reverify many of the sites I manage.