Are your web pages getting deindexed? A Google bug?

A serious Google bug that may have affected your website traffic over the weekend.

On Sunday, Google tweeted, under the SearchLiaison account, saying, "We're aware of indexing issues that impacted some sites beginning on Friday. We believe the issues are mostly resolved and don't require any special efforts on the part of site owners. We'll provide another update when the issues are considered fully resolved."

The issue does not seem to be resolved. Many sites are still finding that large chunks of their site have been removed from Google's index.

Some sites saw as many as 50% of their pages deindexed with this bug. If you do have important pages that are no longer in the index, you can get them reindexed quickly by re-submitting them to the index. In the example below, the page is not indexed, but you can see that you can look up a url in the url inspection tool in GSC, and then click "REQUEST INDEXING":

However, if you've got a large number of pages to reindex there is no way to quickly request indexing in bulk. You could potentially try re-submitting a sitemap to potentially get pages recrawled again. It really does look like Google is working hard on this issue though and it should resolve itself within the next few days.

I hope you were not strongly affected!