Masses of URLs are disappearing from Google right now, which has caused a strong fluctuation in the ranking. According to Google, an indexing problem had started the chaos, and it will be fixed soon. Webmasters will now have to play the waiting game.
Mobile indexing and canonicalization were affected. This meant that URLS could not be indexed at all, or they simply disappeared from Google. On Twitter, several users, including Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable, had complained that several pages were no longer indexed on Google.
This phenomenon is not new – at the end of September just this year there was a similar indexing problem at Google, which was fixed within a day.
The current issues have been a problem already now since September 23rd, and Google had also already announced on Twitter what the problem was. The search engine giant had also assured worried webmasters that everything would be back to normal after the problem was fixed.
