Current News: Google Deindexing bug

On late Thursday, 4th of April 2019 or Friday, 5th of April 2019, webmaster experts started to notice that there were some web pages that are no longer showing in Google’s search engine results pages. According to research, 4% of web pages were affected by the Deindexing bug.

After a few days, Google confirmed that the cause of the de-indexing issue was a bug, and not a Google algorithm update.

There was no explanation given as to the nature of the technical issue. But SEO agencies in Dubai say that URLs would need to be reprocessed before they would return to the index.

How do you know if your site was affected by the bug?

Not every website was affected by this de-indexing issue. So, the 4% data does not mean that your site has dropped 4% of its pages out of the Google index. Each site is unique, and each site can be impacted differently by this bug. However, just to make sure that your site was not affected, internet marketing companies in Dubai suggest that you head over to Google Analytics to see if the bug hurt your site. To make it simple, your main goal is to analyze website traffic, bounce rate, and conversions year-to-date and week-to-week view. If you were affected, then you will probably see an anomaly during the month of March 2019.

As a matter of fact, Google has announced that due to this indexing issue, webmasters may see changes to their reports. Google wrote: “April 5, 2019: Because of internal management of our Search index, some pages of your websites might have been dropped from our index for a period of a few days without any action on your part. The matter is currently being resolved, no action from your side is needed.”

What to do if you still have pages affected by this bug?

Even though Google has confirmed that the indexing issue has been resolved, it is still possible that some URLs are still de-indexed until Google re-crawls and re-index them.

It is highly recommended to check the most important pages of your website to see if they are indexed. If not, you should manually submit these URLs in Google search console. However, it is important to keep in mind that there is a daily limit on the number of URLs you submit in search console, so make sure that you focus on the most important ones.

Businesses who were affected by this issue are encouraged to reach out to an agency in Dubai who offers SEO services in UAE to conduct full SEO review. Or if you are interested in the opportunities of implementing Search Engine Optimization to your website, you can get in touch with Creativo at info@creativouae.com.