Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that a bug prevented Google from crawling for the AMP cache between November 11, 2021 and November 17, 2021. The bug has since been resolved.
Google confirmed. “We saw that crawling for the AMP cache had slowed down for some sites,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “This bug has since been resolved, and an internal analysis showed it wasn’t widespread, and that there were no negative effects overall.”.
The issue. It seems the issue impacted only certain crawling of caches for some sites. “We saw that crawling for the caches had slowed down for some sites. This bug has since been resolved, and an internal analysis showed it wasn’t widespread, and that there were no negative effects overall,” Mueller said on Twitter.
First to notice. Olivier Papon from Seolyzer first spotted the issue and posted about it on Twitter, saying that he noticed Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, has essentially stopped crawling much of the web. He said it began on November 11 at 6PM (GMT) and then crawling went back to normal on November 17 at 8PM (GMT), he said in a follow-up tweet.
Here is the chart he shared showing the drop in crawl activity from Googlebot:
I personally did notice a number of sites show a decline in crawling in the Google Search Console crawl stats report but it seemed not to impact most of the sites I have verified access to in Search Console.
Why we care. If you noticed any issues with new pages being indexed or old but updated pages not reflecting those changes in Google Search, this may be why. Google seems to have resolved the bug and going forward, all should be fine. Google said this wasn’t widespread and “there were no negative effects overall.”
Hopefully, your business and website were not impacted by this bug but if it was, you probably have zero recourse.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.