If it looks like pages aren’t getting indexed based on what you’re seeing in Google Search Console, it’s not just you. It’s everybody.
Google now admits that it’s experiencing “longer than usual” delays in Search Console reporting about indexed pages.
In this article, I’ll cover what we know about this latest bug from Alphabet, Inc.
It’s Only the Index Coverage Report
For right now, it looks like only the index coverage report has a problem. All the other reports appear to function normally.
Google confirmed the existence of the bug in a tweet sent out early this morning: “We’re currently experiencing longer than usual delays in the Search Console Index Coverage report. This only affects reporting, not crawling, indexing, or ranking of websites. We’ll update here once this issue is resolved. Thanks for your patience!”
The problem with the “thanks for your patience” line is we’ve already had a lot of patience.
We're currently experiencing longer than usual delays in the Search Console Index Coverage report. This only affects reporting, not crawling, indexing, or ranking of websites. We'll update here once this issue is resolved. Thanks for your patience!
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) September 14, 2020
Someone pointed out the bug to Google’s John Mueller on September 8. That person noticed the problem on September 1.
Here we are on September 14 and not only is Google just now giving us an official notice about the defect, but it’s also thanking us for our patience.
But Relax
There is some good news here, though. This bug only affects reporting.
In other words, it doesn’t affect the actual indexing of your pages. Those should be indexed at their normal speed.
Google just won’t tell you that the pages are indexed via its Search Console index coverage report.
So at least the important stuff is still working. For now.
About the Index Coverage Report
If you’re not familiar with the index coverage report, it tells you which pages on your website are already indexed. Pages in the index are eligible for search results.
It’s a nice report to have because you can tell at a glance which pages can deliver traffic to your site.
There’s no point in running reports on keywords or URLs that point to unindexed articles. People can’t find those with even the most exact search terms.
So if you know a page isn’t yet indexed then you shouldn’t be looking for traffic from it.
Now you might be wondering: “Until this bug is fixed, how can I find out which of my pages are in Google’s index?”
Fortunately, there’s a way to do that.
The Workaround
If you want to see if one of your pages is indexed, just type “site:youromdain.com:” plus the title of the article.
For example, if you go to Google and search for “site:ignitevisibility.com find new profitable seo keywords”, you’ll find a link to our article entitled “Find New Profitable SEO Keywords in Under 2 Minutes.”
You can see all the pages Google indexed for your site by just typing “site:yourdomain.com” in the search bar. But if you’ve got thousands of pages, that might be a bit too much to work with.
Wrapping It Up
When will Google fix this bug? If you read the notice above, you’ll find that there’s no due date.
So it’s up to us to just wait it out.
But Google definitely thanks us for our patience.
