Google Search Algorithm Update After Indexing Issue

There was a pretty massive indexing issue impacting new content in Google Search most of Friday, July 15th, but that was pretty much isolated to that Friday. Now, I am seeing signals of a Google search ranking algorithm update on Saturday, July 16th.

Are the two related? It is possible but hard to say for sure, like with any of these updates. If you have a ton of new content not being indexed all day, can that cause large volatility once the indexing bug is resolved the following day? Imagine there is this backlog of new content waiting to be indexed and then all of a sudden, Google opens the blockage and lets all that new content be indexed the following day. Does that cause volatility the following day? Sounds feasible? So keep that in mind when I share the rest below.

As a reminder, the last unconfirmed was on July 10th and then the July 7th and 5th updates and before that June 28th, June 23rd, June 19th and 20th, also the Google May 2022 core update began rolling out on May 25, 2022 and was officially pronounced complete on June 9th but we saw big tremors before and after the start and end date of that update.

So I would be cautious about calling this even an unconfirmed Google search ranking update because we had that massive indexing issue the day prior to this. But I figured I’d document this and mention the indexing issue, so that if you do see weird things from the weekend, at least you know you are not alone.