Google fixes Google News indexing bug

Google has confirmed it fixed the ongoing issue with Google News indexing. This resulted in many publishers seeing massive traffic declines from Google News for a three-week period, starting around June 21st.

Google fixed the Google News indexing bug after being an issue for 3 full weeks causing some huge traffic declines for many publishers https://t.co/Llvv7vlqqt pic.twitter.com/tjv9OP05FK

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) July 17, 2023

Google has successfully addressed the disruption in Google News indexing, alleviating the decline in search traffic experienced by publishers. https://t.co/IaeI3GEsYU #GoogleNews #SearchTraffic #Publishers #IndexingDisruption #OnlineNews pic.twitter.com/bEjqgrhmey

— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) July 17, 2023

The update. Google posted an update at 5:06 pm ET today, saying, “We fixed the issue with News indexing. There will be no more updates.”

Google initially discovered the issue on July 10th, and Google identified the specific issue the day after, then implemented a fix on July 12th. After the fix was implemented, publishers began to see improvements.

Now Google is confirming the fix worked, and news publishers should see their traffic at mid-July levels.

Why we care. If your site is in Google News and you noticed a traffic drop from Google News over the past few weeks, it might have been related to this Google News indexing bug. Google fixed the issue today and you should have started to notice normal traffic levels from Google News today.