Google News Indexing Issues 🧩 Crawl or No Crawl July 4 2023
Welcome to Crawl or No Crawl - this is Carolyn Holzman and today is July 4th - Day Number 669 of the indexation research project and Happy Treason Day 9212 days ago.
There is a lot to cover - I’m currently writing up a Definitive guide to the InspectionTool crawlers including the run up from May 17 to July 1 when the switch was turned off for Universal Analytics and we’re all officially GA4.
There are too many details in that to cover in these reports - suffice it to say I’ll post a link to where it’s published once I’m complete on it this week.
Now for the indexation - for starters - today’s test page was launched and within 4 hours was served by both it’s keywords.
That doesn’t happen often.
There is still content published prior to today that is crawled and shows as indexed in search console but hasn’t made it over the served threshold yet.
Looking at the most recent group - the average length of time to publish and get served increased to 5 days.
Circling back to what was happening in the tail end of June - starting on the 23rd some major players in the News Space reported things like
Google News Indexing Issue
We are out of GoogleNews since June 23!!!
And it’s lining up very nicely with the data I was getting from the server logs and the mad dash Google was making to update the InspectionTool crawlers chrome builds as well as the standard crawler agents.
I’ll post these links to the questions in Google Support in here -
https://support.google.com/news/publi...
https://support.google.com/news/publi...
So why am I making an issue out of this? - they are news sites.
If you go back to the CONC report on June 24th - I reported that I thought I was seeing evidence that if your page was not on the same topic as most of your existing served content - it appears to impact whether or not your new content - despite it’s glorious optimizations or request to index - google was showing signs of not indexing it.
The link to that video is below -
• Helpful Content System vs Update 🤔
The report on June 14th - I specifically mentioned that I wondered if what we were seeing was an exaggerated application of the news indexation. The news category in the weather tools is ALWAYS sky high.
• Understanding Indexation and Topical Relev...
Much like seeing a couple of moons circling something I can’t see - I can surmise that the odds of a planet being the source of the gravitational pull for them - I am increasingly connecting dots between what Helpful Content is (its not what we think) in terms of its relevancy to discoverable content already known by Google - and now with News sites - large ones complaining about the lack of visibility of their new content and thus drops in traffic rates because what would have brought them in on any particular day is a news story with a shelf life.
Google! You’ve got some splainin’ to do.
https://www.americanwaymedia.com/goog...
Related Topics:
Google InspectionTool Crawler
Indexation
Serving
Google New indexing issues