In a tweet on Wednesday, Google finally announced for the second time (…and hopefully the last) that the de-indexing bug that impacted many websites across the Internet has been fixed. Google said in its tweet:
“The indexing issue has now been fully resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience as we restored normal operation.”
Last Thursday, website owners turned to the SEO-focused forum site WebmasterWorld to air their dismay over the sudden drop of their Google index ranking and the removal of their pages from the search engine results page. Google initially announced that the issue had been rectified a few hours after the complaints flooded the WebmasterWorld forum thread.
However, site owners continuously reported experiencing the same problem following the announcement. Google executive John Mueller jumped into the chaos and explained that the bug was caused by a technical problem on the side of Google and that the search engine giant was relentlessly working on reprocessing all affected pages.
4% of Google Index Affected by the De-Indexing Bug
Now that the problem has been solved, Moz has released its initial report about the de-indexing bug. According to Moz researcher Peter Meyers, 4% of Google Index had been badly hit by the issue. However, the data was only gathered from around 23,237 stable URLs that appeared in MozCast SERPs.
Meyers said:
“It’s difficult to determine whether this bug was random, affecting all sites somewhat equally, or was systematic in some way. It’s possible that restricting our analysis to “stable” URLs is skewing the results. On the other hand, trying to measure the instability of inherently-unstable URLs is a bit nonsensical. I should also note that the MozCast data set is skewed toward so-called “head” terms. It doesn’t contain many queries in the very-long tail, including natural-language questions.”
According to Meyers, the impact of the de-indexing bug appears to be measurable, but it remains unclear just how big it is. At the moment, sites can’t do anything at all since Google claimed that the problem was due to a bug and not something caused by an update.
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