Healthcare digital marketing depends a great deal on Google’s algorithmic updates. April 2019 did witness some volatility, though it probably wasn’t as chaotic as March and the start of this year has been. The effects of the core update of March 12 were felt all through April Fool’s Day, with the chatter about yet another update doing the rounds from March 29. In fact, the fluctuations have been a trend particularly since the start of 2019. But what dominated the month of April was a mistake on the part of Google that caused sleepless nights for webmasters.
De-indexing of Many Pages
On April 8, Search Engine Roundtable reported various SEOs complaining that Google was removing many of their pages from the index. This de-indexing was first reported on Thursday, the 4th of April, and it continued well into the following week. This was pretty de-motivating for these sites that saw many of their pages just not appear in the search results anymore. It took until Saturday, April 6 for Google to say anything about it. It admitted it had made a mistake and that it was working on re-indexing those pages. Google recommended webmasters to use the URL inspection tool for expediting the process of re-indexing their pages.
Re-indexing Took Nearly a Week
It took until Wednesday, April 10 for Google to report that the issue had finally been fixed. Till then, Google had been tweeting that it’s working on it, though the tweets weren’t always reassuring. Google didn’t give any estimates on what percentage of its pages were affected. It had also claimed that not all URLs would be indexed. Google also reported that it was a bug that was responsible for this mistaken de-indexing that caused so much traffic loss and the resultant income loss for many businesses.
Incidents like this show just how important it is to have a reliable digital marketing agency looking after your SEO. Experienced medical SEO companies can help you ensure you don’t lose too much in terms of traffic and conversions even in a crisis.
