Google encountered an internal problem during indexing

Recently, Google Search Console sent a large number of emails to remind the publisher of the redirect error. However, on Monday, the official Google Search Center Twitter account updated the search marketing community. These emails may have been sent due to internal indexing errors and they are investigating.

Search community receives GSC email

The search community noticed many errors, which is usually a relatively rare issue. It’s very unusual to happen like this.

Glenn Gabe wrote on Twitter:

Note that I see a surge in cross-site redirect errors in the Coverage report. These redirects looked good when analyzing them… Also, this coincided with the crawling statistics error of the “server connection” of the affected site. I think Googlebot has too much eggnog 🙂 pic.twitter.com/PGY0EkLAcv

-Glen Gabe (@glenngabe) December 12, 2021

Redirect error

Many publishers may not see redirect errors often in their Google Search Console. This is a technical SEO issue related to 301 and 302 redirects.

Generally speaking, unless the publisher makes a lot of changes to their website or the plug-in update is very bad, the redirect error will not suddenly appear on its own.

Google’s developer page lists four examples of redirect errors reported by Google Search Console.

Redirect error

1. Redirection chain is too long
   When one URL is redirected to another URL, another URL is redirected to another URL, and so on. This usually occurs on old websites that update old publishing technologies with proprietary URLs to newer Web publishing technologies with more standard URLs.
2. Redirection loop
   This is a problem when one URL redirects to another URL that redirects back to the first URL, forming an essentially endless loop.
3. Redirect URL that exceeds the maximum URL length
   This is another technical SEO problem from Chrome, where the maximum URL length is 2MB. For security and performance reasons, it is recommended to use the maximum URL length.
4. Wrong or empty URL in the redirect chain
   This is self-explanatory.

Google search console to solve the problem

An official Twitter account of Google pointed out that there was an internal problem and confirmed on Twitter that it was investigating the problem.

Google wrote on Twitter:

“An internal issue resulted in an increase in redirection errors and related email notifications during indexing.

This is not due to any website issues, but due to internal Google issues. We hope to resolve this issue as soon as possible. “

An internal issue resulted in an increase in redirect errors and related email notifications during indexing. This is not due to any website issues, but due to internal Google issues. We hope to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

— Google Search Center (@googlesearchc) December 13, 2021

What caused this problem?

Google did not specify what caused the problem, only that it was an internal problem.

Many people in the search community said that Google seems to have reduced its web index, and some people have raised questions about Google’s announcement.

Oh, Hello? When did you fix the problem that the page was not indexed?
We are moving to Duckduckgo.

— Vinyas Gowda (@Vinyas_gowda95) December 13, 2021

The person asking this question has good reason to ask. There is no doubt that others might think that there is a connection between Google’s apparent changes in indexing behavior.