Google is aware of these reports and is investigating the issue.
Barry Schwartz on April 21, 2020 at 3:36 pm
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It appears Google is having issues indexing new and fresh content again. When I try to find new articles from sites that Google generally indexes in real time, such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and this site, Google is not showing these stories or URLs in the index.
New content not showing in Google. You can try some example searches yourself, for example, do a site command search for new articles from the Wall Street Journal by searching for [site:wsj.com] and filtering results for the past hour. All I see are a select number of random category pages, some pages in a different language, but zero recent stories. Here is a screen shot:
An article published on Search Engine Land 20 minutes ago, is still not in the Google index. Here is a screenshot from 3:45pm ET, within an hour of the article being published. Google still not showing any new articles from this site in search, when filtered to show only content within an hour. Google Search Console also says the page is not indexed. It is rare for articles on Search Engine Land not to be indexed within minutes of publishing.
Again? Google has had indexing issues in the past but the last time was last year.
Update. At around 4:30pm, Google is now indexing this article. But it took almost 50 minutes to be indexed, which is unusual.
Google is aware. Google is aware and the issue is being escalated to the right people. Danny Sullivan from Google responded to a complaint about this on Twitter:
I’ll pass it on— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 21, 2020
Why we care. If you run a site that depends on traffic for new content and breaking stories, you may be experiencing these traffic issues. Google wants to index content quickly and serve breaking content immediately, so Google takes these indexing issues seriously. Hopefully things will be back to normal with very shortly.