Google News Tackles Indexing Bug, Affects Some Publishers

In a tweet on Twitter, Google announced it is looking into another indexing bug, but this time on Google News.

The latest bug “appears to involve a limited number of publishers,” per the tweet. “We're actively diagnosing the news issue now.”

The bug stops the online publishers from indexing and serving up content in Google News.

Google earlier today wrote that this is not related to last week's indexing issue, which was resolved. 

Marketers, responding to Google’s tweet, asked for assistance. Stefano Fabbri, head of owned media at H-Farm in Milan, asked Google to check vanityfair.it and wired.it. The content, Fabbri wrote, is not indexing in Google News properly.

The indexing bug does not seem to be limited to the United States. Catalin Nichita, self-proclaimed tech and web-addicted SEO expert, asked Google to take a look at the Romanian market.

“Multiple big publishers have been removed from Google's News carousels (even the sites are still listed in "News"),” he tweeted. “Only a few publishers appear on these spots (carousels) at the moment.”

Earlier this month Google dealt with another index challenge -- a deindexing bug. On April 5, Google confirmed a bug that caused website pages to be deindexed, after site owners reported ranking errors.

Google also had a deindexing bug issue related to its Search Console. The bug caused inaccurate data in the reports, notably the index coverage report and the enhancement reports -- although Google said it had resolved the issues.

As of Monday, Google wrote in a Twitter tweet on its Google Webmasters account that “Search Console is still recovering from the indexing issue we reported on last week. As a result, index coverage and enhancement reports were not updated recently & URL Inspector might not reflect live status, at the moment.”

UPDATE:  Google on Wednesday posted on Twitter the bug has been fixed. “Indexing of news content has now been resolved. New content should be indexed as normal," per Google in a Twitter tweet. "Much of the content missed during the issue has been reindexed and the remaining will be reindexed in the next day or so. Our apologies for inconvenience, and we appreciate your patience.”

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