UPDATE: April 15, 2019
While the indexing issue has been resolved, Google is reporting related issues within Google Search Console.
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.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) April 15, 2019
UPDATE: April 9, 2019
Google says they expect the error to be fixed within 12-24 hours.
We are still resolving the indexing issue that has impacted some pages. We've made further improvements and hope any remaining issues will be done within the next 12-24 hours. Will provide a further update when the issue is fully resolved.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 8, 2019
Original Story
According to Bigger Law Firm Magazine, some website owners started noticing pages missing from Google's index last Thursday, April 4th. Google's John Mueller confirmed the problem but later prematurely announced that it had been corrected.
On Sunday, Google's SearchLiaison account posted the following update on Twitter:
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.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 7, 2019
The team at Custom Legal Marketing has analyzed our websites and thus far, we haven't found any high traffic pages affected by this bug.
Is there anything to worry about?
If your law firm is with Custom Legal Marketing, you have nothing to worry about. We have already analyzed your site and if a page was discovered to be deindexed, we've already requested reindexing.
If your law firm is not with Custom Legal Marketing, the problem will more than likely correct itself in time once Google corrects the error.
Will my search engine rankings be affected?
Possibly. If your competitors are missing pages that were previously indexed, you may experience a temporary boost in your search engine positions. Of course, if you have a page that was deindexed, you will notice a drop in your rankings for whatever keyphrases that page was ranking for.
If CLM isn't managing your law firm's website and search engine optimization, here is what you can do to check your pages and submit them for reindexing.
1) Login to Google Search Console and select your website.
2) Select the “URL Inspection” option from the left menu.
3) Type in or paste the page URL you suspect may have been affected by the recent error.
4) If the next screen says your “URL is on Google”, you don't need to do anything.
5) If your page is not indexed, you can click on the “Request Indexing” link as seen in the image below.
Google is not asking webmasters to do anything at this time. The team at CLM is closely monitoring the situation and will be sure to take whatever action is necessary as we receive more updates.
