Oct 14, 2020

As we have been covering, the Google Search results have been pretty unstable recently. Yesterday and this morning are no different. I am getting complaints both about indexing issues and ranking changes over the past 24-hours or so and honestly, I have no idea if this is a feature or a bug or both.

By feature, I mean, is this a Google ranking update, an algorithmic tweak to the rankings. By bug, I mean, is this Google having problems indexing and ranking or maybe it is Google still working on the fix? I do not know.

What I do know is that there is a lot of instability in the Google search results right now. Isn't there always instability in the search results? Yes, but not at these levels.

I already summarized what is going wrong with Google search recently in this post, but here is a quick snapshot where we know there are canonicalization, mobile-indexing, news-indexing, top stories carousel, and sports scores breaking issues.

Let's talk about the past 24-hours. I have been fielding emails, tweets, forum posts, about complaints on indexing with Google search. Google has not yet said the canonicalization issue is fixed yet, so maybe, just maybe, it is Google working on this issue? But I am not sure.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has as of yesterday a few people saying they are seeing this resolved, for the most part.

Canonical problem is pretty much fixed for me too. Almost 90% URLs are back.

Canonical for one of my websites is fixed an hour or so ago. Was broken since late September. Rankings for that page seem to be back a bit better than expected. But, I wouldn't hold my breadth; could be my eyesight.

But there are still many indexing issue complaints:

Managed to index one article from 1 day ago.

The one from 2 days ago is still not indexed. Even made a sitewide link. Amazing.

Takes much longer to index pages now than it did before may. Like MUCH longer. Usually would happen within minutes.

Manual indexing on GSC totally broken and has been broken for almost half a year now. Google never bothered fixing it and instead they roll out this Core Vital. How are we supposed to "fix" our sites if Google doesn't even crawl or doesn't even want to crawl manually requested pages for indexing?

There is another bug today? Some page are deindex in search, in Italy. From search console them are OK and index. But all page that are crawled from 13 Oct are deindexed from search console. Not only for my site but for some. Them are disappeared also with site: command.

Like I said, I also received numerous emails and complaints via private channels.

Plus, if you look at the complaints about ranking fluctuations in Google, there is a lot:

Hopefully, analytics is slow from yesterday or I just lost 30% of my traffic.

I have seen a drastic drop in ranking for this week. Did anyone notice the same?

HUGE DROP Started on the weekend !

I'm not seeing a huge sustained drop...Saturday dropped, but then Sunday was high. Monday and Tuesday normal, and increasing SERP visibility. The SERPS have been fluctuating day by day for weeks now.

Had a +30% yesterday compared to the previous Monday after weeks of stagnation. Curious to see if that continues throughout the week.

Portugal, poetry niche.

My site never flutuates much from week to week, at most 10%.

25% drop on monday and same pattern today.

Very noticeable.

And the complaints go on and on.

Now the tools are all lighting up as well.

Mozcast:

SERP Metrics:

Algoroo:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

RankRanger:

Cognitive SEO:

SEMRush: