Many website owners of big, small, new and old websites are report slow to no indexing from Google, resulting in drastic drops in Google organic traffic. Google has responded in Google webmaster central that this is no update or algorithm change, but rather a technical issue on Google’s part. Thus answering the posted issues for a great deal of puzzled and concerned webmaster posts.

On 10/22/2010 Google Webmaster Trends Analyst JohnMu responded with the following statement:

Hi everyone

I just wanted to provide a short update. This issue should be resolved soon, but it will take a several days for everything to catch up and for these changes to be visible. I’ll provide another update after the weekend.

In the meantime, there’s no need to make any changes on your side. Content from your sites will continue to be indexed during this time (though perhaps at the moment not as quickly as before in some cases).

Thank you for your patience and for all the feedback!

Cheers,

John

While these issues can be hard to accept, one must simply accept that any network, software and project the size of Google is very likely to have a glitch or 2 upon occasion. The best course of action for any webmaster affected by the glitch or not is to become a “Exceptionally Active”. This means in a nutshell exactly what we tell clients and have always….. Keep your content regular, fresh and unique.

The goal to being “Exceptionally Active” is to create new content (especially new pages) regularly enough to “Train Googlebot” to visit, crawl and index your website more frequently. While this is no bulletproof plan, we see many very active sites that are less affected, or not at all affected by this glitch. It is just a best practice elixir or cure most anything for your website.

JohnMu has promised an update after the weekend and advises that you not make any significant changes to your website in the next few days until this is resolved. He also cautions that once resolved it may take some time to “catch up” the indexing for the affected websites.