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Effects of Google Indexing Bug on Search Results

On 5th of April, 2019 many SEOs and website owners reported that pages were falling out of the rankings. After investigation, Google confirmed that there was a bug which was the reason behind pages becoming deindexed. Since the rankings of the pages came down drastically, a ranking flux was caused due to it but the SERP- monitoring tools do not have the technology to identify and separate the different reasons which caused the flux.

 

Almost about four percent of the indexed pages on Google had been affected by the bug. The tools of Google do help in checking whether a particular page has been indexed or not but after the bug brought down majority of the websites, checking it at such a large scale would have been impossible. Especially when the event has already happened it is difficult to trace it back as people no longer have access to the historical data. It is still not known whether the bug was a systematic one or a random one. But it was clearly seen that the bug had affected every kind of website in the same manner.

 

Analyzing the issue by restricting the causes to stable URLs has skewed the results. But, at the same time, when the instability is analyzed on the basis of unstable URLs, the whole thing becomes a bit nonsensical. Even large websites like Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipedia were affected by this bug. There were only a few domains that had experienced a hundred percent loss until the bug issue was fixed.

 

The fixing of the bug:

Google did not waste any time when it came to fixing the bug. They have brought their whole technical team together containing all the experienced and famous brains to fix it. Google has definitely impressed its customers by working on this issue within six hours of its commencement. They had mostly resolved the bug within a short span of time and have informed their clients that they would provide another update when the team has fully resolved the issue. They have ensured that the owners of the websites on Google will not have to do anything in order to fix the ranking issue of their websites. All would be taken care of by Google and after they have fixed the problem, all the pages would go back to their original ranking.

 

The impact:

The impact of this bug had been huge. The whole flux appears measurable as it was inferred that only four percent of the total number of websites were affected. But even four percent of the total number of sites present on Google is huge. It was also inferred that the bug did not affect only specific pages. It had affected ‘big’ as well as ‘small’ websites on Google. The impact on the big sites was minimal if you consider its long term effect. Google has claimed that the bug was not some deliberate change made by Google but it was an actual bug.

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