Google Search is a search engine that continuously scan websites to index whatever necessary.
Using crawlers, Google can go to one corner of the web to another, on a daily basis. This feat is far from over, simply because the web is continuously growing. Google needs to keep up with its growth, to also understand the trends, people's intentions, the content that can answer those intentions, and rank them accordingly.
Because a lot of people rely on Google, a change to how the search engine show its results can cause a huge stir.
Traditionally, Google Search's results pages change when an update is released. But on August 10, a sudden change massively altered Google Search results, affecting websites and users in all languages, countries and niches, and everything from local services to recipes.
The affect was mostly felt in Europe as well as in Asia.
Many websites reported extremely bad results to the point that they say that their years of internet marketing and SEO attempts were destroyed in a matter of minutes.
The affect was so massive that many in the search community believed that it was an update.
While many complained that their sites went from hero to zero, titans like Amazon, eBay and many popular news websites suddenly occupied most of Google's top pages. Those sites were ranked higher up because they have tons of backlinks.
It seemed that Google returned to the old days when PageRank had a stronger influence.
As a result of this, many webmaster forums and social media networks were filled with complaints and people asking what was going on.
The issue lasted several hours, putting webmasters and many in the SEO community in a bit of panic mode.
Fortunately, what looked like a massive Google algorithm updates, looked more like something was really off course.
Google experienced a rare glitch.
“I confirmed with the team that this is a bug that we are fixing but still in the process of fully diagnosing, so we don’t have specific details to share right now,“ said a Google spokesperson.
On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated.
Thank you for your patience!— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) August 11, 2020
The search giant later acknowledged this, and reported the incident on a tweet on Twitter.
It took Google a few hours to resolve the issue, considering that the glitch had a global affect.
For webmasters, if they see massive Google organic search traffic changes in their analytics or SEO tools from the time period, they should disregard it. But it should be noted that rankings can change all the time.
In this particular case, during that short time period, 'panicked' webmasters may have done some attempts or tweaks to improve what they think they've lost.
Gary Illyes from Google tweeted additional information about why Google's indexing system is vital to how search results show up:
The indexing system, Caffeine, does multiple things:
1. ingests fetchlogs,
2. renders and converts fetched data,
3. extracts links, meta and structured data,
4. extracts and computes some signals,
5. schedules new crawls,
6. and builds the index that is pushed to serving.— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) August 11, 2020
Don't oversimplify search for it's not simple at all: thousands of interconnected systems working together to provide users high quality and relevant results. Throw a grain of sand in the machinery and we have an outage like yesterday.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) August 11, 2020
'Caffeine' is a "whole new web indexing system” that’s “more than 50 percent fresher than our last index and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered”. It was launched in June 2010.