Google is working on a fix with the site command, a command used to restrict the search results to a specific domain name. Google said “we are aware of an issue with the site: command that may fail to show some or any indexed pages from a website. We are investigating this and any potentially related issues.”
The announcement. Here is the announcement from the Google Search Liaison account:
We are aware of an issue with the site: command that may fail to show some or any indexed pages from a website. We are investigating this and any potentially related issues.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 21, 2020
Possible indexing issues. Around 11:30am ET some SEOs were asking Google if there were any indexing issues with Google. Google did not respond to these questions yet but did post this notice about the site command. Google said it is “investigating this and any potentially related issues.”
Here is the issue from Vlad Rappoport from earlier today:
@dannysullivan Are there any reported issues involving indexing? Noticing a lot of results for various queries being omitted as of this morning. cc: @rustybrick
— Vlad Rappoport (@vladrpt) July 21, 2020
Issue is resolved. At 3:25pm ET, Google said the issue is resolved. Here is what Google said.
Today we became aware of an issue that impacted some navigational and site: operator searches. We investigated & have since fixed the bug. Contrary to some speculation, this did not target particular sites or political ideologies….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 21, 2020
We apologize for the concerns caused by this issue and appreciate it being brought to our attention.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 21, 2020
Why we care. SEOs often use site command for debugging some types of SEO issues. Searchers, like me, often use the site command to find content on specific sites. Keep in mind, if you are using the site command for SEO, debugging or searching purposes that it currently does not fully work as expected.
The post Google site command bug being fixed appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Source: IAB