There have been major changes in Google search results worldwide. The reason was apparently not an algorithm update, but an error on the search engine.

Search engine optimizers from all over the world report massive changes in search results on Twitter and in industry forums. According to the Search Engine Journal , it was sometimes no longer even possible to search specifically for the article from a certain page, even if the name of the page was part of the search term. Confronted with this on Twitter , Google’s webmaster trend analyst John Mueller was able to reassure the concerned search engine optimizers: “I don’t know all the details yet, but it seems that there was a glitch on our side and it has been fixed in the meantime.” What exactly what triggered the problem and how long it lasted is currently unclear.

Online shops and affiliate sites were apparently particularly often affected by the error. SEOs from several countries reported on social networks and in industry forums that Amazon, Ebay and news publishers in particular had benefited from the error. According to others, there were massive fluctuations and the search results changed massively several times within a few minutes.

In early June 2020 , Google also had problems with search results . At that time, a bug resulted in some of the new search results not being indexed or being indexed very slowly. Large publishers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were also affected. There were similar problems with indexing in April. After all, the problems were quickly fixed both times. Last year it looked somewhat different: in 2019 there were multiple indexing problems and in one case it even took almost a week to completely correct the error. In contrast, two similar cases in May 2019 were resolved within one and two days, respectively.