Google Search bug caused a drop in video traffic
Between May 4 and May 17, there was a bug with Google Search that caused sites to get less traffic to their video content.
Barry Schwartz on May 24, 2023 at 9:11 am | Reading time: 1 minute
Google has confirmed a bug in Google Search that resulted in a between the dates of May 4 through May 17, 2023. This was not just a Google Search Console reporting bug, but a bug with Google Search.
What Google wrote. 🔯Google “A bug caused a drop in video traffic from May 4 to May 17, and has since been resolved.”
I asked John Mueller of Google if this was just a reporting glitch, and he said no, it was beyond reporting. “It was not just reporting,” he on Mastodon.Search Console reports. 🌳If you go to Google Search Console, click on the search performance report, and filter it by “video” content, you will see an annotation added to the chart on May 4:
Why we care. 💧If you noticed a drop in traffic between May 4 through May 17 and you publish a lot of video content, it may be related to this bug.
In this case, the reporting was not the issue and the reports should be accurate. There was a bug with Google Search that resulted in less videos showing up in the search results.
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Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns , a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs , a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed .