SEO 101 Ep 537: SEO 2026 Ranking Factors, Indexing Bug Updates, and Google AI’s Impact on Traffic

Uh, Google, uh, has confirmed there was an indexing reporting bug.

Uh, this was back on September 8th.

You may have noticed within Google Search Console that indexing coverage was alarming.

Uh, pages that were fully indexed were now listed under crawled, uh, currently not indexed, despite having actually been indexed.

Uh, it turns out this was yet another bug over at Google Search Console.

John Mueller referred to it as a short blip.

Over at SE Roundtable, Barry did mention that he was not actually planning on reporting this bug at all, and he decided to because many people were concerned about it, and, um, the bug was fixed right away by Google, uh, even before Barry's article was published.

And I, I questioned should I even talk about it on the show or not.

And I thought it was worth it just as a bit of a reminder that if you see things or encounter issues in, you know, Google Business profiles, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, even in the regular organic results, it is always best never to panic.

Uh, if anybody saw that blip in the crawled not indexed back on September 8th, and you saw that spike the way it did, I could see how it would be rather alarming, and it might cause people to panic and try to figure out, "What's going on? Why is Google hurting my site?" And then it was fixed.

It was a bug.

It wasn't even a problem.

And overreacting or, or taking actions against issues that you find too quickly, you know, it's not that uncommon to find these bugs in Search, and then if you try to fix something that's not actually broken, Google then fixes a bug, and you're actually in trouble potentially, depending on what you've done to try to remedy the problem that doesn't even exist.

So anyways, yeah, I always say give it a bit of time.

I mean, even...

Sometimes even a couple hours is enough for a bug to resolve itself, like in this case.

Sometimes it's a few days.

Uh, but if you do see something weird, and it's been some length of time, definitely check out the SEO news sites like Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, et cetera.

Check 'em all out.

Uh, Search Engine Guide.

Check 'em out and see if there's any news being reported that matches what your issue is.

Maybe just do a Google search.

Is Search Console broken? Is it...

You know, whatever, whatever the issue might be.

And, and just make sure that it is a real problem before you try to fix it.