From the past 48 hours we have been finding that many big websites and blogs have been hit with some kind of penalty which may not be set manually but its automatically been set. This is not actually a penalty but a problem which may either be some kind of preview of any upcoming Google algorithm change or else a problem because of the ‘Live Updations’ feature.
This means that most of the recent blog posts are not been indexed, while all the previous blog posts are normally ranking without any changes. Here is a example search of “Find Lowest Prices of Online Products with Barcode“.
You can find that other results are shown but not the actual blog post in the Search Results Page. The problem is that even if the articles are being indexed you would find in the search results that there is a ‘suffix’ to the URL like
/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=hacker_safe
/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=
All of these are normally added up when the feedburner service tries to track down the stats of the URL in terms of Clicks, comments, sharing data etc but seems like this time these pages are ranking in the Search Engine and not the actual URL’s are being shown. May be this is a effect of the live updates feature or the big update like Caffeine coming up live. Hope all these changes would soon be removed and the rankings of the blog posts would soon be back.
Note that its not just us but blogs like Techcrunch / Mashable are also having the same issues. Check the below screenshot for more where the URL has become > http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/21/zynga-brings-farmville-to-the-ipad/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=hacker_safe & http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/21/zynga-brings-farmville-to-the-ipad/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 but not the actual URL is being ranked.
Are you also having these kind of messed up problem from the past few days? Is it something different in your experience, post below.
Thanks Amit for writing a post on that. I was frantically looking for some info… none of my recent posts have been indexed. The fact that even the biggies are facing a similar problem is a sure comfort.
yep the whole blogosphere seems like to be under this problem but seems like everyone is ignoring it and not worrying much about it.
Google is no doubt always on a roll of upgrading its indexing service by all means. Nice to see your posts Amit. All the best!
So I am not the only one who is seeing that recent posts are not indexed and showing up in SERP’s. Not even, when you paste the complete URL in the search box. Phew !
Some sort of algo updates or may be something else. Thanks for the heads up !
This is why I visit this blog every few hours because you can get real good times every now and then. Will wait for few days more to see if the problem is gone or not.
Do update us!
Interesting… I too wrote a small piece on the same problem on my blog and that got indexed in no time.
yep, the interesting fact is that this article got indexed in real time but not the others in the past 2 days.
No, this article is index in the News search … not in the regular SERP
Ya, I noticed it…. I regularly check my site: index … to see if my posts is indexed or not…. And somehow I get indexed within a minute or max 5-10mins.
But for the last 24+ hrs there is no indexing of posts. I thought it was a penalty faced by me… I did face a penalty on Feb.
But when I checked with various blogs I read… I saw they are not indexed too.
But lifehacker or mashable or other very popular site havent been affected.
I guess they are updating their algorithms… becoz I saw a video of matt cutts where he said indexing rate and “minty fresh indexing” is affected for a few days.
Btw, there is still some activity on the site: in blogsearch. Old posts getting re-indexed etc.
Btw have you noticed there is also a new type of search result for example… “My Post Title – Snaphow” but I haven’t set “Snaphow” at the Title End.
So that’s the indexed post from the rss feed ping.
As mentioned in the post, the main culprit is Feedburner which is hopefully the root cause of this problem. Its always good to share your these kind of experiences with others to find out if this problem is just with you or with everyone. Do Tweet or Share this article on facebook if you like it!
Yes, I have also seen the same thing [Title – Blog name] on search results but the actual title tag is different on a particular article or page of your site.
Another thing to note is that the Social links are getting indexed, the ones in Friendfeed for example, but not the actual article. If we assume that the algo is changing or something similar, how come the links from Friendfeed are getting indexed while not the actual blog post.
Yeah amit even i was tracking it for couple days last caching date was on 18th after that they are indexing urls every 24hrs without caching you can check you articles which are posted on 19th it has been indexed.But they are lot of social bookmarking sites like humsurfer,ready2beat has been cached normally without any changes my 3 blogs are affected from couple of days hope this will be Resolved soon
Socail bookmarking
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:O0jiVTgLbhwJ:www.jeqq.com/+jeqq&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=firefox-a cached on 21st
http://www.goofit.com
cached on http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LpGWJPkutLIJ:www.goofit.com/+goofit.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=firefox-a
blogs
http://blog.itechtalk.com
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V_tcb9-fKWcJ:blog.itechtalk.com/+blog.itechtalk&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=firefox-a
cached on 18th
Same issue with My Blog too, 4 days back I got over 30k results now it was minimized to just 6K results 🙂
Thnx a lot for information
I am facing this problem for the past one week.. none of my new blog posts gets on index and also found many of my indexed pages are removed and restored and removed again it kinda goes like that..
Me too facing the same problem….My twitter and blogengage share link are indexing quickly within a 2-3 minutes but my original post takes A day to get into SERP 😮
When this problem will get solved ?
my new posts are getting indexed but as mentioned the actual URL is not shown instead a different one is shown,
Huge sigh of relief! Caffeine Sucks! Even Steve Rubel says – “Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant”
Google has made changes in the search snippet. A week ago I searched for my website name “icreon design studio” and “icreon us”, I got surprised to see the title in the search snippet. I thought my site got listed in Dmoz thats why Google is showing website name as title. But alas, when I checked Dmoz both were not yet approved. This is new as Google is now using website content more frequently for showing title. This is happening on many other searches for other sites also.
This is what Google says:
“If a title tag is missing, or if the same title tag is used for many different pages, Google may use other text we find on the page.”
I am also facing this for last 4 days, whenever i search using the post title, google is returning the homepage url and not the actual post..
i found out that the blogs/sites that are registered in google news are still being cashed well. for example infocuts dot com.
I am bit relieved that Its not just happening to my site.
I am also facing google indexing problem how to get out of this.Does google penalised our blogs does it stops indexing our blogs from now on,then what to do I am so concerned
Its better to stop blogging and getting into a different profession because Google is going to stop indexing all the blogs especially technology related. [j/k]
Do you have any ideas how to overcome this,can we get out of this what we have to do for Google to do index blog posts as usual now.
As per a thread @ google, it seems like Google Engineers are now notified about this problem and it should be fixed real soon but expect atleast a few days of traffic / revenue loss because of this.
@amitbhawani
Thanks for that, can u please share that thread link of Google for me.
Update : Check this link – http://tinyurl.com/39z8zkd where a Google Employee has answered about this problem.
I hope this problem get resolved soon, I am facing this problem for almost 3 days now and want google to sought this out ASAP.
The same is being experience by my blogs. Hope all this is for the greater good.
this problem is really pissing me off! thanks to Google, i was getting thousands of people everyday! these days, online users are less than b4 because Google search is not indexing.. please Google look out for this
Hi Friends,
Amit has been very active in educating fellow blog visitors about very useful information like this.
All the best Amit.. Keep up the good work.
Visiting ur blogs really helps.
– Leela
Thanks for this post! I face the same problem since 4 days. I’m really frustrated about this. But now i’m a bit reassured, because it seems to be a “global google problem”.
One more latest update can be found here : http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7908355c3d1637e8&hl=en&start=120
JohnMu, a Google employee has assured that things will be set right soon and there shall be indexing as before, *sometime soon.
Cheers,
Me too getting the same problem. Hope it will be fixed soon.
Good, I thought it was just my site.
Here is a update :
This issue should be resolved soon, but it will take a several days for everything to catch up and for these changes to be visible. I’ll provide another update after the weekend.
In the meantime, there’s no need to make any changes on your side. Content from your sites will continue to be indexed during this time (though perhaps at the moment not as quickly as before in some cases).
Thank you for your patience and for all the feedback!
JohnMu
Google Employee
Ive had some problems on a few of my sites too, I thought I was doing something wrong at first. I really hope this is fixed soon.
Oh yeah.. I faced this issue exactly! Hope it gets rectified soon.
There is some issue with regard to Search Engine Indexing as well.
My blogpost is also having issues. It seems that Google will soon fix this issue. The answer from JohnMu clarifies that there is an issue and it will be resolved soon.
Frankly, I am really feeling relieved now. Thanks for the update Amit.
Amit., Looks like Google has taken note of the problem and fixing it..http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/28557772021
Seems like the problem is fixed.
i tried a method posted on shoutmeloud and found that all my new posts are getting indexed .
As per my observation.. Seems the problem is fixed now
Regards,
Leela
i had a job blog dot blogspot dot com which reached 1800 visits a day and i decided to change it to a custom domain, it hit me hard and it dipped to less than 100 visits a day ..
is it related to this .. please help .. or moving to a custom domain did this …
Blogspot blogs were in some serious issue and also when you transfer from blogspot to a custom domain you can expect some traffic loss initially.
My posts are getting indexed, so it means only popular blogs are facing the issue. It could be due to there blog structure, but for future this is very bad. Google has to resolve this issue as soon as possible.
Ohhh, Thanx for the post Amit, i was getting tense that what happened to my blog. None of the post after 21st on my blog got crawled and indexed. Hope Google will fix this soon.
The problem seems to have sorted out for now.
thanks Amit.. for your this post.. i also suffer same issue
is this problem solved? please update.
I also want to know if the problem is already fixed..because my I am facing some issues about getting indexed
I think it’s fixed but it’s going to take a few more days for Google to catch up with everything. I’m still having problems getting my site indexed.
its ok now i think. My posts are indexing without any problem.
Thanks Amit
Thanks for the helpful info about what’s been happening. My site went from number 1 on page 1 of Google for more than one search phrase and had other search phrases turning up half way down page one. Then, overnight, none of the three key search phrase brought the site up at all. I couldn’t find it. It still ranks number 1 page 1 on Yahoo and Bing (and possibly some others). The really weird thing is that today I found my site on page one for the main search phrase but it was a link on a community news board that I placed when posting an add for the site!!! I have also found on of my site pages on page 3 or 4 but the content relevancy to the search phrase is only a fraction of what the home page it. Like about 10% !!! It too three years hard work and I was getting 10,000 plus visits a week and had been up to 40,000. Now, I’m doing well if I get 2,000
I have the same problem: 16000 pageviews a day before 22th October and now 7000 a day. No good news at the moment..I’m waiting but google indexes only my homepage at the moment and not the single post…
So strange…
Same problem is with me to index my website in Google search….after google has merged local business and organic results….!
But some time is very good if your website on top for organic and local result.
I had face problems…Some of page..Index but some of page not indexed…
This is just happened to me as of 21/02/2011 – all my existing blog pages are ranking well but I cant get any new posts indexed. This didn’t happen to me back in October 2010 – could this an issue with my own blog and if so, how do I find out if I’ve been penalised?
Well its the 09/03/2011 and all of my blogs and of my friends (especially new posts) arent been indexed. Strange thing about it, webpages that scraped our pages are been indexed, with our content.
This is frastrating
Marc
no local result , may be grow. thanks
It will happen for “high paying keywords” when i see that it will word press blog and one post each blog rank no3 spot Google HOW? NOW HE CHANGE TO .COM