Google temporarily lost part of its Search Index in April after pushing out data center update

Google has given new revelations about its indexing issues in April, where part of the search index was temporarily lost. This was on April 5th when Google accidentally dropped pages from its search index while it was pushing out an update to its data centers.

This was small and only affected a small number of documents, however it was not small enough to go unnoticed by SEOs and site owners. Google even acknowledged all the social media chatter going on at the time, which helped the company become aware of the issue.

Google had to pause updating the Search Console database while it was fixing the error with its search index. This resulted in unreliable data for some reports.

The problem went on through most of April while Google acknowledged the Search Console issue on the 15th and announced it was resolved on the 30th. The bug was fixed on April 11th, but it initiatied a ripple effect with a number of related errors showing up shortly afterward.

Going forward, Google will make a raft of changes to how it communicates with webmasters;

Those changes include:

• Create a central hub in Search Console where Google can quickly share the latest information about widespread bugs.
• More promptly post to the Search Console data anomalies page when issues occur that will have a long term impact on data.
• Send tweets as quickly as possible to inform webmasters about such issues.