Some webmasters probably got a big scare in the last week. Where the traffic from Google broke, some saw immediately that the website was no longer listed in the search results. Usually that means a lot of work needs to be done, if not this is the end of a website – at least as far as traffic from the search engine is concerned. But it can also be different. The disappearance of websites from the SERPs in the last week, the error was not with the website operators, but with Google!

Last Thursday, many webmasters reported a sudden slump in Google traffic. In most cases, a review revealed that the sites were no longer searchable in the Indes. There was much discussion in many places and the uncertainty was great. Did you make a big mistake or was there maybe a big update on Google? Luckily none of this was the case. Rather, it was probably a problem with Google. John Mueller, webmaster trends analyst at Google, answered at least the many messages on Twitter. He spoke of a technical problem, but for which a complete solution was found. Not exactly an answer that says a lot. How many websites were affected by this issue was also unknown.

Quite simply, the technical problem was not solved, because even on Sunday not all websites were back in the index and John Mueller added that there are still pages that would have to go through a solution process. It would not progress as fast as one would have liked. Meanwhile, Webmasters criticized the poor communication. There was no real information, an official message came late and you could not really find out anything about the Search Console. However, this can help if your own websites are still not returned to the index. If you do not want to wait for Google’s solution, you can re-index it there.