I was confused as to why Google Search Console lost 16-days worth of data if the indexing bug lasted from April 5th to April 11th. Furthermore, if the indexing bug started on April 5th, why did Search Console have data loss from April 9th through April 25th? Shouldn't there be a one-to-one overlap in dates to the data loss?
I asked John Mueller of Google these questions at the 10:35 mark into the video hangout yesterday and he basically said the data loss is directly related to the indexing issues. He said the indexing issues still lingered on after they said they fixed it on the 11th.
When I asked about the 11th being the end date of the indexing issues, he said "No, there were issues kind of pending and rolling there, so that's... it was pretty heavy-duty."
I still don't understand then why the Search Console data loss didn't start on April 5th but started four-days later on April 9th?
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is the transcript:
Barry: So on that is you said that you can see that information in Search Console but the data anomalies page specifically says that between April 9th in April 26th, I mean 25th, all that data for everything minus the Performance report is showing they're just copying April 26 data so you kind of like masking the index coverage issue because that technically started around the fifth I believe but it continued through the 11th. So you really can't tell you're indexing issues by looking at Search Console data.
John: Well, yeah, because we don't have any data that we could show there.
Barry: Why is that. I am not understanding, why is the data lost if it was an indexing issue?
John: If we don't have it from from the indexing side we can't collect it for Search Console.
Barry: Right but that was fixed on 11th so?
John: No, there were issues kind of pending and rolling there, so that's... it was pretty heavy-duty.
Barry: So the issues in Search Console were directly related to the indexing bugs from April 5th?
John: Yeah. I don't know if we'll have more information on that in the future. I hope we can do a short blog post or something to at least talk about how these things happen and how we deal with them internally. But I'm not sure.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
