Google had a rough couple of weeks earlier this month with bugs affecting de-indexing of search results, GMB issues and problems with News.
According to Google its de-indexing of search results is now resolved, but not after many businesses are calling for an apology from Google since some websites lost huge amounts of traffic from around April 5 – 10,, 2019.
Approximately 1 week after this event, Google News experienced a de-indexing issue involving some major publishers. Apparently, as of this writing, this issue has also been fixed.
One aspect that Google didn’t address specifically is that during the de-indexing of search results, the My Business traffic also dropped for many websites. I saw this first-hand as many high-traffic sites experienced significant drops in traffic, concurrently with search traffic. This issue now seems to be resolved.
Google hasn’t publically stated the cause of these de-indexing issues. For SEO’s such as myself it’s important to keep on top of these events so that this information can be communicated clearly and proactively to customers especially where their results, traffic and phone calls have been impacted.
Citations
https://searchengineland.com/google-google-news-indexing-bug-has-been-resolved-315557
https://searchengineland.com/does-google-owe-us-more-than-just-an-apology-over-de-indexing-315468
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-console-is-still-affected-by-indexing-bug/303495/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-issue-is-now-fully-resolved/303007/
