Google confirmed indexing issue affecting a large number of sites

Google has confirmed that it is having indexing issues indexing new content and displaying that content in Google Search and on Google News. The issue started sometime before 7 am ET today, as I first reported prior to Google’s confirmation on the Search Engine Roundtable.

Google’s confirmation. Google confirmed this on Twitter saying “There’s an ongoing issue with indexing in Google Search that’s affecting a large number of sites. Sites may experience delayed indexing. We’re working on identifying the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours.”

Timeline. So far, we know Google has been having issues indexing new content prior to 7 am ET today, July 15, 2022. Google confirmed the issue at about 10:50 am ET on July 15, 2022. At around 3 pm ET today, Google said they found the issue and is now working on a fix. Google wrote “We’ve identified the issue with indexing and we’re working on a fix. Next update will be within 12 hours.”

What is the issue. The issue is that Google is not indexing new content from sites published across the web. That includes new content on news sites, like this one, or the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or any new content across the web. Google does seem to be crawling this new content but simply not indexing the new content, preventing Google Search from showing those results in Google Search or Google News.

Here are some screenshots showing the site command restricted to the past hour, not showing content on news sites that post content all the time:

Why we care. If you are a news publisher, breaking news stories, and that content is not being indexed that means you are not going to be seen in Google Search or Google News for those stories. If you are a searcher and looking for new content, you won’t really find that content on Google Search or Google News.

To make things worse, Google Analytics 4 real-time traffic reporting seems to be buggy this morning and not showing full traffic data.

This likely will impact your site’s traffic for any new content that you have published this morning.

Google is working on a fix and we hope they resolve the issue soon.

Resolved. Google the following morning said all the issues are now fully resolved:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.