Widespread chaos in website rankings after Google bug bites over the weekend 

Website owners across the globe are anxiously awaiting an explanation and a timeframe on a fix, to what was one of the most significant Google indexing bugs the industry has seen.

Many websites have had important web pages de-indexed, resulting in critical losses in their rankings and organic traffic from Google.

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, replied to tweets this morning with:  “I don’t have an ETA. I would expect it to be soon, matter of hours maybe but can’t guarantee that, which is why we said we’d give a further update when we know it’s all clear.”

Perth digital agency Bonfire was one of the first to identify the issues late last week. SEO Manager, Matthew Elshaw (pictured), spent the weekend analysing SERP (Search Engine Results Page) trackers and client results to determine what was happening.

“From the data we’re seeing this looks like it’s a major incident that has impacted a lot of websites,” said Elshaw. “We’ve seen a large spike in our internal SERP tracker (which monitors rankings across 50,000 keywords) and across third-party tools like SEMRush.”

Elshaw said the bug will have had a significant impact on businesses over the weekend, especially those that rely on Google traffic for online sales.  He has posted a more thorough review of the incident on the agency’s blog.

“If you’ve woken up to a poor weekend in terms of revenue, it would be worth checking your website analytics and checking how your Google rankings are performing.”