On Thursday, Google started to delist many URLs from its search index. According to Search Engine Land, it reported to Google on this issue after the influx of complaints from the SEO community. These complaints resulted from webpages missing from the Google SERP without any reason. As a result, websites’ traffic dropped because these pages were no longer be getting any organic traffic due to this issue.
On Saturday, Google’s John Mueller incorrectly reported that the problem was fixed:
Sorry — We had a technical issue on our side for a while there — this should be resolved in the meantime, and the affected URLs reprocessed. It's good to see that the Inspect URL tool is also useful for these kinds of cases though!
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 6, 2019
John Mueller and the Search Liaison account on Twitter replied shortly on Sunday regarding this matter:
Just a short update on this — indeed, it does look like there are still some pages that need to be reprocessed. Our systems are making good progress here, but it’s taking longer than I initially expected. Using Inspect URL + Submit to index is fine, if you want to do that.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) April 7, 2019
We’re aware of indexing issues that impacted some sites beginning on Friday. We believe the issues are mostly resolved and don’t require any special efforts on the part of site owners. We’ll provide another update when the issues are considered fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 7, 2019
Also, as stated in the same tweet, It’s confirmed that there’s nothing the site owners can do to get the issue resolved. With that said, if there are high-value pages that you absolutely need to index again, you can always explore the Inspect URL tool.
Using the Inspect URL tool, site owners can get Google to recrawl and reprocess specific pages. The down-side is that it can only process one URL at a time.
Let’s hope for more updates from Google.
The indexing issue should be almost completely resolved within the next eight hours. Some documents might take an additional 12-24 hours to restore. We’ll provide a further update when the issue is fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 9, 2019
The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2019