Google Index Issues Are Happening With New Contents Again

It seems that Google is having problems indexing fresh and new articles again. When website owners and SEO companies UK attempt to find new contents from websites that Google typically indexes in real-time, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and this site, these stories or URLs are not showing in the Google index.

New content isn’t displayed on Google. Admins and SEO experts can do some sample searches. For instance, they can perform a site command search to find new articles from the Wall Street Journal through browsing [site:wsj.com] and filter results for the past hour. All they’ll see are a chosen quantity of random category web pages, few webpages in a different language, but no latest stories. Below is a photo showing the current results:

The article published on Search Engine Land minutes ago, remains unseen in the Google index. Below is the screenshot from 3:45 pm ET, within an hour of the article being published. The search engine giant is not displaying any new content from this location in the search, when filtered to display content within an hour. Google Search Console furthermore claims the said page isn't indexed. It’s uncommon for these articles to not be indexed within minutes of being published.

Over again? Google has had indexing problems in the past. The most recent occurrence was in 2019.

Update. The post was indexed by Google at around 4:30 pm. This means that it took nearly 50 minutes to be indexed, which is uncommon.

Google knows. The company is aware, and the Google index issue is being reported to the correct individuals. Google’s Danny Sullivan replied to a Twitter complaint regarding this issue:

Why we care. If your site depends on traffic coming from breaking stories and new content, you may be encountering traffic problems. Google prefers to index content quickly and serve breaking content fast, so they treat Google index problems seriously. Hopefully, things will return to normal in no time.

Want To Know How To Change Sitewide Main Navigation But With Minimised Negative Ranking Effects?

John Mueller from Google talks about how changing sitewide main navigation can affect rankings. He also shared the best approach to reduce negative ranking changes.

Changes to the Site Wide Navigation

The question was related to making a change that could affect sitewide main navigation.

This is the question:

“We’re thinking of changing the main nav anchors by removing gender specific term. For example we currently have men Citizen watches, this would change to Citizens Watches, place under a drop down menu for mens watches. Would this affect the rankings of men’s citizen watches or can the crawler understand the sub-nav dropdown?”

Hence, they basically wish to combine the gender-modified sub-topics under a gender neutral keyword variant.

Additionally, they may want to rank for the non-gender distinct version of the keyword phrase without the rankings for the gender specific keywords changing or being lost.

Sometimes, there is extra traffic for more general keyword phrases. However, ranking for these might be complicated due to Google’s encouragement to users to drill down with People Also Ask type navigational help.

Choosing a more specific keyword phrase over a general phrase can seem like a gamble in terms of which will convert at the better rate. However, it is generally suggested that you should choose specific phrases as they have the tendency to convert well.

Google’s John Mueller gave a positive reply:

“So usually we can understand the context of pages fairly well. And if you’re just moving things around from… like direct anchor text to more indirect anchor text and that you’re kind of shuffling the categories around a little bit then from my point of view that seems like a reasonable thing to do. And it wouldn’t necessarily be something where I’d assume like something negatively would come out of that”.

Then he changed direction and started talking about ranking changes.

“That said, anytime you do restructure your website it does mean that we have to relearn the setup of your website a bit. And that can result in some ranking changes. So that’s something where… my general recommendation for these kinds of things, if you’re a little bit worried about that would be to test it out. Try it out on a small part of your website where you get significant traffic but it’s not a crazy amount of traffic”.

Will Sitewide Main Navigation Changes Impact Rankings?

Answers to this question contain many variables, leading to none of them being completely or solely correct.  A website with link deep to the inner pages may be safe to negative ranking adjustments because of the changes in the navigational structure.

On the other hand, websites with a fewer robust inlink structures may be more unpredictable, meaning more unexpected results.

All information in this local SEO blog are based from https://searchengineland.com/google-not-indexing-new-content-again-333369 and https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-on-navigation-menu-changes-and-rankings/363286/#close. Click both links to read more.

There’s lots of professional SEO companies that can help you improve your rankings as well as drive more traffic to your website. Here at Position1SEO, our team of experts can do all of these for you. Just visit our website to know more.