As we have been covering, the Google Search results have been pretty unstable recently. Yesterday and this morning are no different. I am getting complaints both about indexing issues and ranking changes over the past 24-hours or so and honestly, I have no idea if this is a feature or a bug or both.
By feature, I mean, is this a Google ranking update, an algorithmic tweak to the rankings. By bug, I mean, is this Google having problems indexing and ranking or maybe it is Google still working on the fix? I do not know.
What I do know is that there is a lot of instability in the Google search results right now. Isn’t there always instability in the search results? Yes, but not at these levels.
I already summarized what is going wrong with Google search recently in this post, but here is a quick snapshot where we know there are canonicalization, mobile-indexing, news-indexing, top stories carousel, and sports scores breaking issues.
Let’s talk about the past 24-hours. I have been fielding emails, tweets, forum posts, about complaints on indexing with Google search. Google has not yet said the canonicalization issue is fixed yet, so maybe, just maybe, it is Google working on this issue? But I am not sure.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has as of yesterday a few people saying they are seeing this resolved, for the most part.
But there are still many indexing issue complaints:
Here are some, not all, of the complaints sent to me via Twitter:
Like I said, I also received numerous emails and complaints via private channels.
Plus, if you look at the complaints about ranking fluctuations in Google, there is a lot:
And the complaints go on and on.
Now the tools are all lighting up as well.
Here is more from Dr. Pete on Moz:
Fun times…
If I hear more from Google on this, I will let you all know.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
