Big Google Search Update Turns Out to be a Search Results Glitch

• A week ago, the entire SEO community was on its feet, wondering what hit them? Was it a new Google update they didn’t see coming?
• At that point, websites from the 5th and the 6th page jumped to page one, whereas many websites from page one got demoted to other pages.
• That pretty much got the entire SEO community in a panic mode. 

However, there’s a catch

• What everyone thought was a new massive update turned out to be a glitch on Google’s side.
• John Mueller from Google later tweeted saying that it was a glitch on their side and that their engineers have fixed it in the meantime.
• After they confirmed that it was big on their side, the SEO community felt at peace, knowing that things are back in normal once again.
• All websites got its original ranking. The balance in the SEO universe was restored, for the community that lost its breath for a while.

So, what went wrong?

• Later, Gary Illyes from Google went all technical in an attempt to explain what went wrong on their side. He said that something went wrong with the indexing system and that caused havoc.
• In a tweeter thread, he spoke about their indexing system named Caffeine. Caffeine is responsible for various processes such as ingesting fetch logs, scheduling new crawls, rendering data, fetching data, computing signals, extracting structured data, extracting links, and so on. It is a rather long and extensive list of operations performed by their indexing system.

• He also explained how all that is interconnected and how a bug in one of the processes affects another process which eventually down streams to website ranking.
• He was trying to make a point that they run a very complex, interconnected system that is not error-free. 

The bottom line

• If this was an update, then it would have turned the SEO industry upside down.
• “Fortunately”, it was just Google’s indexing system having a bad day, or a bad hour at the very most.
• Things are now back in normal, business goes as usual, and we all pray that there aren’t any shock waves like that one anymore.