Google Replaces Google Discover Search Console Reporting Error With Search Features Bug Confirmation
One of the confirmed data anomalies comments indicating a flaw in the search features was removed by Google, which then inserted a new note verifying a bug in Google Discover logging that caused a data drop in the Search Console Discover performance reports on October 23rd.
Recall that on October 28th, Google said that there was a fault affecting several search functionality, including but not limited to Top Stories. If you don’t believe me, you can view the message in the Wayback Machine. I’ve copied the message and linked to it above.
This is what Google said. “A bug that primarily affected some search functions, such as Top Stories, and that first became apparent between October 18 and October 19, was fixed by Google. The full rollout of the bug remedy will take around a week.” I guess it was fixed, but why did you take off this note? Why not make a note of it?
Then Google updated its warning, affecting Google Discover, with a new one dated October 23. On October 23, a logging problem resulted in a dip in the Google Discover performance report. The search results were unaffected because this was only a reporting error and not a bug with Google Search results.
This indicates that the traffic counter for search reports decreased as a result of the problem.
The previous appearance of the page is shown here:
Here is what it looks like now:
There was a report bug, so if you saw a decline in Google Discover on October 23 in your Search Console data, that was the cause. I truly don’t know about October 18th to October 28th…
I did, however, contact Google for more information regarding the note.
I did, however, contact Google for more information regarding the note from October 28th, but I never received it.
Update: According to John Mueller on Mastodon, it was taken down because Google doesn’t note search errors on that page “We’ll work it out. The difficulty is essentially that we don’t have a nice place to put items like this. There is still value in the “text,” we just don’t know where to put it.”
Mastodon forum conversation.
Update 2: This notification was restored back by Google this afternoon with some adjustments; here is a screenshot:
