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Millions of operations, businesses, and systems depend on Google. Like any other system, however, Google is prone to outages that can result in massive disruptions. Major outages are rare, and the company works quickly to resolve issues as quickly as possible. The last major disruption in Google services occurred on December 14, 2020 as a result of a network infrastructure issue. The disruption lasted approximately one hour.

Other than major outages, the search engine experiences occasional micro disruptions. Often, users are left in the dark about these disruptions. However, Google’s launch of its search status dashboard may help resolve this issue.

How Will the Dashboard Work?

Whenever a user experiences problems, the Google search status dashboard will show if there is an issue with the search engine. According to Google, the dashboard will report on the issues that occurred in the last seven days and their current status.

Typically, the dashboard monitors the search system for indicators impacting crawling, indexing, and serving. In the past, Google has always depended on Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to detect and report these issues internally. After detecting and internal reporting, Google would externalize this report through its Google Search Central Twitter account.

Posting Within an Hour of Issue Detection

According to a statement from Google, the company will post within an hour of their SREs confirming the presence of a widespread and ongoing issue. After posting, the company will issue a detailed update of the incident within 12 hours of its detection. Once reported, the incident will remain on the dashboard as an active case until engineers at Google fix the issue.

However, the end of an issue from Google’s side may not necessarily mean that websites will stop experiencing the effects of the disruption. Some sites may continue to be impacted until they are reprocessed. Site reprocessing involves re-indexing a website’s content for Google crawlers. Not all disruptions will require such intervention, but it is important to be aware of an outage’s effect on your site.

How Does the Dashboard Help SEO?

The Google Search status dashboard information may not directly affect your SEO. However, it can help you understand the root causes of your SEO problems and how to take corrective actions. For example, suppose a site experiences a steep decline in traffic due to a Google outage. In that case, reporting the drop is much easier with the information provided by Google.

Besides posting an issue on the dashboard and actively resolving it, Google engineers will also be working on reducing the data the issue generates on sites. This will help minimize the impact of disruptions on sites’ SEO.

It is still possible that SEO experts will spot issues with the search engine before Google posts them on its dashboard. However, it is useful to have a platform where users can confirm these suspicions with the relevant authority.