10 ms·

Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

433 points by nafnlj 9mo ago

p0w3n3d 9mo ago
Sounds similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343 in terms, that Google decides who survives and who does not in business
- cosmicgadget 9mo ago
  Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970987 https://gehrcke.de/2023/09/google-changes-recently-i-see-more-of-discovered-currently-not-indexed/ https://gehrcke.de/2023/09/google-changes-recently-i-see-mor... The wrong RSS thing may have just tipped the scales over to Google not caring.
- cyberrock 9mo ago
  In the past I've heard that TripAdvisor has 60% market share for local reviews in the UK. Did Google Maps really climb that quickly? Are Instagram and TikTok not shaping tastes in London too? I feel like she might be assigning too much power to it just because that's what she used. That's not to say I don't have gripes with how Google Maps works, but I just don't know why the other factors were not considered.
  - leoedin 9mo ago
    I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything! I just checked a few local restaurants to me in London that opened in the last few years, and the ratio of reviews is about 16:1 for google maps. It looks like stuff that’s been around longer has a much better ratio towards trip advisor though. Almost certainly Instagram/tiktok are though. I know a few places which have been ruined by becoming TikTok tourist hotspots.
    - dazc 9mo ago
      'I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything!' Counterpoint: I have met people in the UK who's lives revolve around doing nothing but.
    - paganel 9mo ago
      Not in the UK, but from Romania, I last checked Tripadvisor back in 2012, and that was for a holiday stay in the Greek islands. Google Maps has eaten the lunch of almost all of the entrants in this space, and I say that having worked for a local/Romanian "Google places"-type of company, back in 2010-2012 (after which Google Places came in, ~~stole~~ scrapped some of our data and some of our direct competitor's data and put us both out of that business).
      - jfil 9mo ago
        I'd be curious to read that whole story of Google putting the conpany out of business. Would you consider writing about it in a post?
echelon 9mo ago
We need a P2P internet. No more Google. No more websites. A distributed swarm of ephemeral signed posts. Shared, rebroadcasted. When you find someone like James and you like them, you follow them. Your local algorithm then prioritizes finding new content from them. You bookmark their author signature. Like RSS but better. Fully distributed. Your own local interest graph, but also the power of your peers' interest graphs. Content is ephemeral but can also live forever if any nodes keep rebroadcasting it. Every post has a unique ID, so you can search for it later in the swarm or some persistent index utility. The Internet should have become fully p2p. That would have been magical. But platforms stole the limelight just as the majority of the rest of the world got online. If we nerds had but a few more years...
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
  That literally already exists and nobody uses it. Gnutella. Jabber. Tor. IPFS. Mastodon. The Entire Fucking IPv4/IPv6 Address Space And Every Layer Built On Top Of It. (if you don't think the internet is p2p, you don't understand how it works) You know what else we need? We need food to be free. We need medicine to be free, especially medicines which end epidemics and transmissible disease. We need education to be free. We need to end homelessness. We need to end pollution. We need to end nationalism, racism, xenophobia, sexism. We need freedom of speech, religion, print, association. We need to end war. There are a lot of things we as a society need. But we can't even make "p2p internet" work, and we already have it. (And please just forget the word 'distributed', because it's misleading you into thinking it's a transformative idea, when it's not)
  - vladms 9mo ago
    I do not think free is attainable for everything due to thermodynamics constraints. Imagine "free energy". Everybody uses as much as they want, Earth heats up, things go bad (not far from what is actually happening!). I would settle for simpler, attainable things. Equal opportunity for next generation. Quality education for everybody. Focus on merit not other characteristics. Personal freedom if it does not infringe on the freedom of people around you (ex: there can't be such thing as a "freedom to pollute"). In my view Internet as p2p worked pretty well to improve the previous status quo in many areas (not all). But there will never be a "stable solution", life and humans are dynamic. We do have some good and free stuff on the Internet today because of the groundwork laid out 30 years ago by the open source movement. Any plan started today will have noticeable effect in many years. So "we can't even make" sounds more of an excuse to not start, rather than an honest take.
graeme 9mo ago
Entirely possible the rss failed validation triggered some spam flag that isn't documented, because documenting anti-spam rules lets spammers break the rules. The amount of spam has increased enormously and I have no doubt there are a number of such anti-spam flags and a number of false positive casualties along the way.
- Eisenstein 9mo ago
  If failing to validate a page because it is pointing to an RSS feed triggers a spam flag and de-indexes all of the rest of the pages, that seems important to fix. By losing legit content because of such an error they are lowering the legit:spam ratio thus causing more harm than a spam page being indexed. It might not appear so bad for one instance, but it is indicative of a larger problem.
bjt12345 9mo ago
What I find strange about Google, is that there's a lot of illegal advertising on Google maps - things like accomodation and liquor sellers that don't have permits. However, if they do it for the statutory term, they can then successfully apply for existing-use rights. Yet I've seen expert witnesses bring up Google pins on Maps during tribunal over planning permits and the tribunal sort of acts as if it's all legit. I've even seen the tribunals report publish screenshots from Google maps as part of their judgement.
- deltoidmaximus 9mo ago
  Reminds me of Trap streets or Trap towns that cartographers would use to watermark their maps and prove plagiarism. The trouble is reality would sometimes change to match the map.
- oakwhiz 9mo ago
  legal citogenesis?
  - actionfromafar 9mo ago
    Clan justice, google is the clan.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
      Reality is just tug of war and weight is all that matters at the limit
- rcxdude 9mo ago
  Is it treated differently from other kinds of advertising? A lot of planning and permitting has a bit of a 'if it's known about and no-one's been complaining it's OK' kind of principle to it.
- lunias 9mo ago
  I was a victim of this when I moved into my house. Being unfamiliar with the area, I googled for a locksmith near me. It returned a result in a shopping center just about a mile away from me. I'd driven past that center before, it seemed entirely plausible that there was a locksmith in there. I called the locksmith and they came, but in an unmarked van, spent over an hour to change 2 locks, damaged both locks, and then tried to charge me like $600 because the locks were high security. It's actually a deal for me, y'know, these locks go for much more usually. I just paid them and immediately contacted my credit card company to dispute the charge. I called their office to complain and the lady answering the phone hung up on me multiple times. I drove to where the office was supposed to be, and there was no such office. I reported this to google maps and it did get removed very quickly, but this seems like something that should be checked or at least tied back to an actual person in some way for accountability. Then I went to the hardware store and re-changed all the locks myself.
throwaway984393 9mo ago
[dead]
FuturisticLover 9mo ago
Google search results have gone shit. I am facing some deindexing issues where Google is citing a content duplicate and picking a canonical URL itself, despite no similar content. Just the open is similar, but the intent is totally different, and so is the focus keyword. Not facing this issue in Bing and other search engines.
- daemonologist 9mo ago
  I've also noticed Google having indexing issues over the past ~year: Some popular models on Hugging Face never appear in the results, but the sub-pages (discussion, files, quants, etc.) do. Some Reddit pages show up only in their auto-translated form, and in a language Google has no reason to think I speak. (Maybe there's some deduplication to keep machine translations out of the results, but it's misfiring and discarding the original instead?)
  - sischoel 9mo ago
    The issues with auto-translated Reddit pages unfortunately also happens with Kagi. I am not sure if this is just because Kagi uses Google's search index or if Reddit publishes the translated title as metadata. I think at least for Google there are some browser extensions that can remove these results.
    - black_puppydog 9mo ago
      The Reddit issue is also something that really annoys me and i wish kagi would find some way to counter it. Whenever I search for administrational things I do so in one of three languages, German, French or English depending on which context this issue arises in. And I would really prefer to only get answers that are relevant to that country. It's simply not useful for me to find answers about social security issues in the US when I'm searching for them in French.
  - torben-friis 9mo ago
    Reddit auto translation is horrible. It’s an extremely frustrating feeling, starting to read something in your language believing it’s local, until you reach a weird phrase and realise it’s translated English. It’s also clearly confusing users, as you get replies in a random language, obviously made by people who read an auto translation and thought they were continuing the conversation in their native language.
digitalgravix 9mo ago
[dead]
huksley 9mo ago
I have the same issue with DollarDeploy and Bing (and consequently with DuckDuckGo which uses bing) Primary domain cannot be found via search - Bing knows about brand, LinkedIn, YouTube channel and but refuses to show search results about primary domain. Bing search console does not give any clue, force reindexing does not help. Google search works fine.
nottorp 9mo ago
I bet Google doesn't know why either...
- DeathArrow 9mo ago
  And it's not like they actually care enough to know why.
- hackerbeat 9mo ago
  Yeah. And they've now milked the whole web for AI and couldn't care less about the mess they made.
hyruo 9mo ago
I encountered the same problem. I also use the Bear theme, specifically Hugo Bear. Recently, my blog was unindexed by Bing. Using `site:`, there are no links at all. My blog has been running normally for 17 years without any issues before.
firefoxd 9mo ago
Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified. 1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking. 2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my search page. Basically people were searching for crypto and scammy websites on my blog. Odd, but not like they were finding anything. Turns out, their search query was displayed as an h1 on the page and crawled by google. I was basically displaying spam. I don't have much control over ai overview because disabling it means I don't appear in search at all. But for the spam, I could do something. I added a robot noindex on the search page. A week later, both impressions and clicks recovered. Edit: Adding write up I did a couple weeks ago https://idiallo.com/blog/how-i-became-a-spammer https://idiallo.com/blog/how-i-became-a-spammer
- bootsmann 9mo ago
  Sorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?
  - firefoxd 9mo ago
    So the spammer would link to my search page with their query param: example.com/search?q=text+scam.com+text On my website, I'll display "text scam.com text - search result" now google will see that link in my h1 tag and page title and say i am probably promoting scams. Also, the reason this appeared suddenly is because I added support for unicode in search. Before that, the page would fail if you added unicode. So the moment i fixed it, I allowed spammers to have their links displayed on my page.
    - Calavar 9mo ago
      Reminds me of a recent story on scammers using search queries to inject their scam phone numbers into the h1 header on legitimate sites [1] [1] https://cyberinsider.com/threat-actors-inject-fake-support-numbers-into-official-brand-sites/ https://cyberinsider.com/threat-actors-inject-fake-support-n...
dazc 9mo ago
Breaking News: Google de-indexes random sites all of the time and there is often no obvious reason why. They also penalize sites in a way where pages are indexed but so deep-down that no one will ever find them. Again, there is often no obvious reason.
- p410n3 9mo ago
  Do you have any resources here? The /r/seo subreddit seems vers superficial coming from an web agency background so its hard to find legit cases versus obvious oversights. Often people make a post describing a legit sounding issue on there just to let it shine through that they are essentially doing seo spam.
  - dazc 9mo ago
    It's something you'll experience if you publish many sites over time. Can't point to any definitive sources, many of the reputable search related blogs are now just Google shills.
    - Aachen 9mo ago
      Or if you search for content which you know exists on the web and it suddenly takes an unusual amount of coaxing (e.g. half a sentence in quotes, if you remember it correctly word for word) before it brings up the page you're looking for Like, isn't this a well-known thing that happens constantly no matter if you're a user or run any websites? Relying on search engine ranking algorithms is russian roulette for businesses sadly, at least unless you outbid the competition to show your own page as an advertisement when someone searches your business' name
- skeptic_ai 9mo ago
  [dead]
- hackerbeat 9mo ago
  Totally. They've completely lost the plot.
cabirum 9mo ago
In 2025, is it still prohibively expensive to run some community-supported crawler & search engine? Without Google censorship, ads, and ai.
- mariusor 9mo ago
  Based on marginalia's work I would say no, but maybe you're thinking of a different scale than they work at.
nmeofthestate 9mo ago
A weird thing: on the hacker news page, in firefox mobile, all the visited links are grey, but the link to this blog post won't turn grey even when visited.
quietfox 9mo ago
I'll be honest, I read "Google de-indexed my Bear Blog" and was looking forward to discovering an interesting blog about bears.
- Bengalilol 9mo ago
  Coming from a quietfox, it is OK. It is important to preserve oneself ^^.
- xeonmc 9mo ago
  You may find rather unexpected results if you look for blogs with an interest in bears.
- binarymax 9mo ago
  Same. I still don’t know why the word “Bear” was used in the title.
  - saint_yossarian 9mo ago
    I guess they use this blogging platform: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/
    - binarymax 9mo ago
      Makes sense. Hadn't heard of that platform before but looks really nice.
Havoc 9mo ago
Parts of Google are all Blackbox-y. Never know when computer says no. And if they had usable ways to contact a human they’d just tell you they don’t know either
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
p410n3 9mo ago
I ran into the same thing! My site still isnt indexed and I would REALLY like to not change the URL (its a shop and the url is printed on stuff) - redirects are my last resort. But basically what happened: In august 2025 we finished the first working version of our shop. I wanted to accelerate indexing after some weeks because only ~50 of our pages were indexed and submitted the sitemap and everything got de-indexed within days. I thought for the longest time that its content quality because we sell niche trading cards and the descriptions are all one liners i made in Excel. ("This is $cardname from $set for your collection or deck!"). And because its single trading cards we have 7000+ products that are very similiar. (We did do all product images ourselves I thought google would like this but alas). But later we added binders, whole sets and took a lot of care with their product data. The frontpage also got a massive overhaul - no shot. Not one page in index. We still get traffic from marketplaces and our older non-shop site. The shop itself lives on a subdomain (shop.myoldsite.com). The normal site also has a sitemap but that one was submitted 2022. I later rewrote how my sitemaps were generated and deleted the old ones in search console hoping this would help. It did not. (The old sitemap was generated by the shop system and was very large. Some forums mentioned that its better to create a chunked sitemap so I made a script that creates lists with 1000 products at a time as well as an index for them.) Later observations are: - Both sitemaps i deleted in GSC are still getting crawled and are STILL THERE. You cant see them in the overview but if you have the old links they still appear as normal. - We eventually started submitting product data to google merchant center as well. It works 100% fine and our products are getting found and bought. The clicks still even show up in search console!!!! So I have a shop with 0 indexed pages in GSC that gets clicks every day. WTHeck? So like... I dont even know anymore. Maybe we also have to restart like the person in the blog did and move the shop to a new domain and NEVER give google a sitemap. If I really go that route I will probably delete the cronjob that creates the sitemap in case google finds it by itself. But also like what the heck? I have worked in a web agency for 5 years and created a new webpage about every 2-8 weeks so i roughly launached about 50-70 webpages and shops and i NEVER saw that happen. Is it an ai hallucinating? Is it anti spam gone too far? Is it a straight up bug that they dont see? Who knows. I dont (Good article though and I hope maybe some other people chime in and googlers browsing HN see this stuff).
motbus3 9mo ago
Without going into details. The company I work for has potentially millions of pages indexed. Despite new content being published everyday, since around the same October dates we are seeing a decrease in the number of indexed pages. We have a consultant for the topic but I am not sure how much of that conversation I could share publicly so I will refrain myself of doing so. But I think I can say that it is not only about data structure or quality. The changes in methodology applied by Google in September might be playing a stronger role than what people initially thought
- p410n3 9mo ago
  What "changes in methodology applied by Google in September" are you referring to? There surely is a public announcement that can be shared? Most curious to hear as a shop I built is experiencing massive issues since august / september 2025
inglor_cz 9mo ago
At the risk of sounding crazy, I de-indexed my blog myself and rely on the mailing list (which is now approaching 5000 subscribers) + reprints in several other online media to get traffic to me. On a good day, I get 5000 hits, which is quite a lot by Czech language community standards. Together with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, this removed a lot of pressure to conform to their unclear policies. Especially around 2019-21, it was completely unclear how to escape their digital guillotine which seemed to hit various people randomly. The deliverability problem still stands, though. You cannot be completely independent nowadays. Fortunately my domain is 9 years old.
- Aachen 9mo ago
  Similar here. I've removed my websites from Google so people would find that other engines can return more complete results. People can find the content using any other engine (or LLM) or links in relevant places. Using anything but the monopolist should pay off until it's no longer a monopoly, or at least not one abused to gain power in other markets like by advertising their browser product on the homepage and not allowing anyone else to advertise there (much less for free)
DeathArrow 9mo ago
We depend too much on Google.
qwertox 9mo ago
When I reload the page "https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-bear-blog-and-i-dont-know-why/ https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-b...", I get Request URL: https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-bear-blog-and-i-dont-know-why/ https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-b... Request Method: GET Status Code: 304 Not Modified So maybe it's the status code? Shouldn't that page return a 200 ok? When I go to blog.james..., I first get a 301 moved permanently, and then journal.james... loads, but it returns a 304 not modified, even if i then reload the page. Only when I fully sumbit the URL again in the URL-bar, it responds with a 200. Maybe crawling also returns a 304, and Google won't index that? Maybe prompt: "why would a 301 redirect lead to a 304 not modified instead of a 200 ok?", "would this 'break' Google's crawler?" > When Google's crawler follows the 301 to the new URL and receives a 304, it gets no content body. The 304 response basically says "use what you cached"—but the crawler's cache might be empty or stale for that specific URL location, leaving Google with nothing to index.
- jorams 9mo ago
  You get a 304 because your browser tells the server what it has cached, and the server says "nothing changed, use that". In browsers you can bypass the cache by using Ctrl-F5, or in the developer tools you can usually disable caching while they're open. Doing so shows that the server is doing the right thing. Your LLM prompt and response are worthless.
  - qwertox 9mo ago
    When Chrome serves a cached page, like when you click a on this page and then navitate back or hit F5, it shows it like this: Request URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196076 Request Method: GET Status Code: 200 OK (from disk cache) I just thought that it would be worthwhile investigating in that direction.
    - jorams 9mo ago
      That's a different situation. The browser decides what to do depending on the situation and what was communicated about caching. Sometimes it sends a request to the server along with information about what it already has. Then it can get back a 304. Other times it already knows the cached data is fine, so it doesn't send a request to the server in the first place. The developer tools show this as a cached 200.
xnx 9mo ago
The author doesn't know the cause but states "The whole affair is Google’s fault"?
- g947o 9mo ago
  There are three possibilities: Author's fault, Google's fault, someone else's fault. From the post, while it is hard to completely rule out the possibility that author did something wrong, they likely did everything they could to remove the suspicion. I assume they consulted all documentation or other resources. Someone else's fault? It is unlikely, since there isn't (obviously) another party involved here. Which leaves us to Google's fault. Also, I mean, if a user can't figure out what's wrong, the blame should just go to the vendor by default for poor user experience and documentation.
  - skeptic_ai 9mo ago
    [dead]
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo ago
  You're absolutely right, we should give google the opportunity to defend itself. What's the phone number google provides so their victims can speak directly with an informed googler to discuss it? What's that? Google doesn't publish a phone number for their victims to do that? They just victimize and hide? Okay then google, here's your chance: please reply to this-here post of mine, with a plausible explanation that convincingly exonerates you in light of the evidence against you. I'll check back in a few hours to see whether google has done so. Until they do, we can continue blaming them.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- jlarocco 9mo ago
  Surely whether Google indexes a page or not is Google's decision?
- 9mo ago
scosman 9mo ago
How does one debug issues like this? I have a page that ranks well worldwide, but is completely missing in Canada. Not just poorly ranked, gone. It shows up #1 for keyword in the US, but won't show up with precise unique quotes in Canada.
- ipaddr 9mo ago
  Buy a .ca domain for seo results and point to existing content
Aldipower 9mo ago
Google search also favors large, well-known sites over newcomers. For sites that have a lot of competition, this is a real problem and leads to asymmetry and a chicken-and-egg problem. You are small/new, but you can't really be found, which means you can't grow enough to be found. At the same time, you are also disadvantaged because Google displays your already large competitors without any problems!
econ 9mo ago
I never really use it but there is a lot in the Yahoo index that google refuses to index. https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=blog.james-zhan.com&fr=yfp-hrmob&fr2=p%3Afp%2Cm%3Asb&.tsrc=yfp-hrmob&ei=UTF-8&fp=1&toggle=1&cop=mss https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=blog.james-zhan.com&fr=yfp...
- guerrilla 9mo ago
  I thought Yahoo! was just Bing now. The real Yahoo! died ages ago.
  - econ 9mo ago
    I don't know and don't doubt it but the results don't match. (For me at least)
donatj 9mo ago
About six months ago Ahrefs recommended I remove some Unicode from the pathing on a personal project. Easy enough. Change the routing, set up permanent redirects for the old paths to the new paths. I used to work for an SEO firm, I have a decent idea of best practices for this sort of thing. BAM, I went from thousands of indexed pages to about 100 See screenshot: https://x.com/donatj/status/1937600287826460852 https://x.com/donatj/status/1937600287826460852 It's been six months and never recovered. If I were a business I would be absolutely furious. As it stands this is a tool I largely built for myself so I'm not too bothered but I don't know what's going on with Google being so fickle. Updated screenshots; https://x.com/donatj/status/1999451442739019895 https://x.com/donatj/status/1999451442739019895
- dmboyd 9mo ago
  It’s probably also reflective of the fact that google are throwing all their new resources at AI, as soon as you’ve hit cache invalidation you’re gone, and anything new that’s crawled is probably ranked differently in the post llm world.
- AznHisoka 9mo ago
  Lesson: if its working, dont fix it
- motbus3 9mo ago
  They already scouted all content they needed. Sites are now competition for their AI systems
- mohas 9mo ago
  exactly my experience, suddenly thousands of non indexed pages, never figured out why, had to disband the business as it was content website selling ads.
  - account42 9mo ago
    Good riddance.
    - 9mo ago
watwut 9mo ago
I noticed google not being able to find smaller blogs a few years ago. The sort of blogs I used to like and read a lot - small irregular blog of an expert in something like cryptography, sociology etc kind of disappeared from the search. Then they disappeared for real. Even when I knew the exact name of article I was looking for google was unable to find it. And yes it still existed,
- sethops1 9mo ago
  I have noticed the same thing. And the blogs are still there, I checked, and marginalia returns them as top results when I search the relevant keywords. Google just really doesn't care.
- iamnothere 9mo ago
  Marginalia search is good for this. But generally it’s becoming a real problem due to Google’s dominance. Blog authors ought to look into web rings and crosslinks again to help each other out with discovery.
onetokeoverthe 9mo ago
[dead]
ZiiS 9mo ago
Bear witness that Google have bear away from bearing Bear blog.
searchlurch 9mo ago
[dead]
ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
Why do you care if Google indexes your site or not? I'm annoyed that mine even shows up on Google.
dmix 9mo ago
I find this thing sometimes works itself out. Just submit sitemaps and the usual stuff and be careful with your HTML.
luxuryballs 9mo ago
It’s weird that the number one search engine in modern times is so finicky, perhaps just has become way over-engineered and over-rigged. Just index the web, at a certain point they went from search engine to arbiter of what people can find.
runjake 9mo ago
This submission title is wrong. The Title should be what the post title is: "Google De-Indexed My Entire Bear Blog and I Don’t Know Why" Bearblog.dev is not de-indexed from Google. I can pull up results fine.
Popeyes 9mo ago
Had the same issue - we have a massive register of regulated services and Google was a help for people finding those names easily. But in August suddenly "Page is not indexed: Crawled – currently not indexed" shot up massively. We've tried all sorts to get them back into the index but with no help. It would be helpful if Google explained why they aren't indexed or have been removed. As with the blogpost every other search engine is fine.
- AznHisoka 9mo ago
  What url is your website if you dont mind sharing?
PrairieFire 9mo ago
Whether or not this specific author’s blog was de-indexed or de-prioritized, the issue this surfaces is real and genuine. The real issue at hand here is that it’s difficult to impossible to discover why, or raise an effective appeal, when one runs afoul of Google, or suspects they have. I shudder to use this word as I do think in some contexts it’s being overused, I think it’s the best word to use here though: the issue is really that Google is a Gatekeeper. As the search engine with the largest global market share, whether or not Google has a commercial relationship with a site is irrelevant. Google has decided to let their product become a Utility. As a Utility, Google has a responsibility to provide effective tools and effective support for situations like this. Yes it will absolutely add cost for Google. It’s a cost of doing business as a Gatekeeper, as a Utility. My second shudder in this comment - regulation is not always the answer. Maybe even it’s rarely the answer. But I do think when it comes to enterprises that have products that intentionally or unintentionally become Gatekeepers and/or Utilities, there should be a regulated mandate that they provide an acceptable level of support and access to the marketplaces they serve. The absence of that is what enables and causes this to perpetuate, and it will continue to do so until an entity with leverage over them can put them in check.
- hirako2000 9mo ago
  If they considered having some ethical responsibility they would at least tame the bidding war that turned a well paid ads for an existing, unrelated business show before the legitimate link, or limit it so that the search result to show the legitimate link on the first page. For certain popular sites, it doesn't. Those businesses got to pay the shelf tax if they want their published piece to ever be - not just seen, but reasonably - found when looking specifically for it.
- _heimdall 9mo ago
  The situation reads more like a monopoly issue rather than a gatekeeper issue. Because google owns the indexer and the search tool most used, they're really only gate keeping their own sandbox.
  - ethbr1 9mo ago
neilv 9mo ago
> Second, the issue couldn’t be the quality or the quantity of the content. I came across some other pretty barebones Bear blogs that don’t have much content, and looked them up on Google, and they showed up in the results just fine. An example: Suggestion: Remember that many large companies are emergently shitty, with shitty processes, and individuals motivated to act in shitty ways. When a company is so powerful, this might be a time to think about solidarity. When you're feeling an unexplained injustice from them, sometimes saying "but you let X do it" could just throw X under the bus. Whether because a fickle process or petty actor simply missed X before, or because now they have new reason to double down and also punish the others (to CYA consistency, or, if petty, to assert their power now that you've questioned it).
foobarkey 9mo ago
Probably an intern (oh its 2025, maybe LLM?) messed up some spaghetti part and the async job for reindexing your site is failing since then and the on-call is busy taking mojito/the alert is silenced :)
storus 9mo ago
They probably don't know why it was de-indexed either, likely a bunch of unexplainable ML models flagged it.
ciferkey 9mo ago
Adding another data point from my own experience. I had a very similar case with my own blog which I detailed here: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/i-dont-want-to-play-the-seo-game/ https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/i-dont-want-to-play-the-seo... Gone through everything I can find, but nothing has made a difference for months now. Would love to hear any thoughts people have that aren't the usual checklist items. Good news is I still get some visitors through Kagi, DDG, and Bing.
arjie 9mo ago
Google is blackboxy about this and I understand why. SEO is an arms race and there's no advantage to them advertising what they use as signals of "this is a good guy". My blog (on Mediawiki) was deranked to oblivion. Exactly zero of my pages would index on Google. Some of it is that my most read content is about pregnancy and IVF and those are sensitive subjects that google requires some authorship credibility on. That's fair. But there were other posts that I thought were just normal blog posts of the form that you'd expect to be all right. But none of the search engines wanted anything to do with me. I talked to a friend[0] who told me it was probably something to do with the way MediaWiki was generating certain pages and so on, and I did all the things he recommended: * edit the sitemap * switch from the default site.tld/index.php/Page to site.tld/fixed-slug/Page * put in json+ld info on the page * put in meta tags The symptoms were exactly as described here. All pages crawled, zero indexed. The wiki is open to anonymous users, but there's no spam on it (I once had some for an hour before I installed RequestAccount). Finally, my buddy told me that maybe I just need to dump this CMS and use something else. I wondered if perhaps they need you to spend on their ads platform to get it to work so I ran some ads too as an experiment. Some $300 or so. Didn't change a thing. I really wanted things to be wiki-like so I figured I'd just write and no one would find anything and that's life. But one day I was bored enough that I wrote a wiki bot that reads each recently published page and adds a meta description tag to it. Now, to be clear, Google does delay reinstatement so that it's not obvious what 'solved' the problem (part of the arms race), but a couple of days later I was back in Google and now I get a small but steady stream of visits from there (I use self-hosted Plausible in cookie-free mode so it's just the Referer [sic] header). Overall, I get why they're what they are. And maybe there's a bunch of spammy Mediawiki sites out there or something. But I was surprised that a completely legitimate blog would be deranked so aggressively unless a bunch of SEO measures were taken. Fascinating stuff the modern world is. I suspect it has to do with the Mediawiki because the top-level of the domain was a static site and indexed right away! 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrhizor https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrhizor
FragrantRiver 9mo ago
This is not about bears at all. Very disappointed.
subpixel 9mo ago
Bearblog.dev keeps subdomains out of search indexes until it approves them, as a measure against hosting the sort of things that would get the whole system de-indexed. My guess is that they are more successful at suppressing subdomains than at getting them indexed. After all, they are not in control of what search engines do, they can only send signals. For reference, I have a simple community event site on bearblog.dev which has been up for months and is not in any search index.
hackerbeat 9mo ago
Don't take it personal. Google has lost control of its algo a long time ago already.
terrycody 9mo ago
This is a known Google soft penalty in order to contain spam contents and domains, but unfortunately, this thing penalized a lot of good, clean, and legit blogs, and when you caught this penalty, in 99% cases, you will never recovered. It will only shows 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,11, or simialr numbers when you site:yourdomain on Google. I found this thing around 2019, and it still exists till today. A way to identify this: first post more than 20-30 articles on your blog, and if after several months, it still shows only several pages when you site: your domain, then it mostly caught this thing. More info: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/anyone-site-only-4-results-indexed-penalty-now.1318746/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/anyone-site-only-4-results...
pentagrama 9mo ago
> Every time I published a new post, I would go to GSC and request indexing for the post URL, and my post would be on Google search results shortly after, as expected. I doubt this is the actual cause, but I can’t think of any other plausible explanation. One possibility is that repeatedly requesting manual indexing in GSC (Google Search Console), while the same URLs were also being discovered automatically through the sitemap, may have unintentionally triggered a spam or quality signal in Google’s indexing system. This kind of duplicated or aggressive indexing behavior could be misinterpreted by the algorithm, even if the content itself was legitimate.
eikowagenknecht 9mo ago
I‘m running a very small personal website / blog as well (https://eikowagenknecht.com https://eikowagenknecht.com) where I‘ve been writing about mostly home automation related things that I couldn’t see properly documented before, but also other topics sometimes. A typical page would be a migration guide for Home Assistant from a Pi 4 to Pi 5. These niche posts had their steady stream of visitors for years now, coming almost exclusively from Google. But August 25 2025, from one day to the other it dropped by about 95 percent and it has been that way ever since, from 1000 visitors per month to maybe 50. Nothing I tried SEO wise could fix it. Now I don’t need visitors for anything, but I‘m kind of sad that people who were clearly finding my content useful (I got lots of thank you mails and things like that) can’t find it any more. Nowadays, I get more traffic from Bing, Yandex.ru, DDG and Brave than from Google..
devil1432 9mo ago
I remember when I was 12yo, I used to create a lot of small fan pages, blogs and forums (with total of 10 users if I was lucky). They were always indexed by Google with no problem. I miss these simpler times. Nowadays, Internet is no longer democratic.
marbu 9mo ago
Run into a similar problem with my blog this year. After spending some time trying to resolve it, I just gave up. I can understand that every now and then Google changes it's rules and validation procedures, so that what used to work now gets removed from the index out of sudden, given their fight with spam and slop. But what I'm struggling to understand is how could Google crawler and Google Search Console be so bad so that: * google crawler stops fetching sitemap out of sudden, even though Google claims it's an important signal for the search engine * requesting sitemap refresh via GSC fails on "unknown" error, which is puzzling considering according to my web logs, nobody tried to load it between my request and the error * after fixing an error, validation job gets stuck for weeks, only to fail for unclear error * random deindexing events as explained in the post And I don't buy the argument that this is necessary for Google to deal with spam, because Bing Webmaster Tools just works flawlessly, and they have to deal with it as well. I don't understand how a small business deal with this kind of issues.

433 points by nafnlj 9mo ago

Sounds similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343 in terms, that Google decides who survives and who does not in business

cosmicgadget 9mo ago
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970987 https://gehrcke.de/2023/09/google-changes-recently-i-see-more-of-discovered-currently-not-indexed/ https://gehrcke.de/2023/09/google-changes-recently-i-see-mor... The wrong RSS thing may have just tipped the scales over to Google not caring.
cyberrock 9mo ago
In the past I've heard that TripAdvisor has 60% market share for local reviews in the UK. Did Google Maps really climb that quickly? Are Instagram and TikTok not shaping tastes in London too? I feel like she might be assigning too much power to it just because that's what she used. That's not to say I don't have gripes with how Google Maps works, but I just don't know why the other factors were not considered.
- leoedin 9mo ago
  I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything! I just checked a few local restaurants to me in London that opened in the last few years, and the ratio of reviews is about 16:1 for google maps. It looks like stuff that’s been around longer has a much better ratio towards trip advisor though. Almost certainly Instagram/tiktok are though. I know a few places which have been ruined by becoming TikTok tourist hotspots.
  - dazc 9mo ago
    'I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything!' Counterpoint: I have met people in the UK who's lives revolve around doing nothing but.
  - paganel 9mo ago
    Not in the UK, but from Romania, I last checked Tripadvisor back in 2012, and that was for a holiday stay in the Greek islands. Google Maps has eaten the lunch of almost all of the entrants in this space, and I say that having worked for a local/Romanian "Google places"-type of company, back in 2010-2012 (after which Google Places came in, ~~stole~~ scrapped some of our data and some of our direct competitor's data and put us both out of that business).
    - jfil 9mo ago
      I'd be curious to read that whole story of Google putting the conpany out of business. Would you consider writing about it in a post?

echelon 9mo ago

We need a P2P internet. No more Google. No more websites. A distributed swarm of ephemeral signed posts. Shared, rebroadcasted. When you find someone like James and you like them, you follow them. Your local algorithm then prioritizes finding new content from them. You bookmark their author signature. Like RSS but better. Fully distributed. Your own local interest graph, but also the power of your peers' interest graphs. Content is ephemeral but can also live forever if any nodes keep rebroadcasting it. Every post has a unique ID, so you can search for it later in the swarm or some persistent index utility. The Internet should have become fully p2p. That would have been magical. But platforms stole the limelight just as the majority of the rest of the world got online. If we nerds had but a few more years...

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
That literally already exists and nobody uses it. Gnutella. Jabber. Tor. IPFS. Mastodon. The Entire Fucking IPv4/IPv6 Address Space And Every Layer Built On Top Of It. (if you don't think the internet is p2p, you don't understand how it works) You know what else we need? We need food to be free. We need medicine to be free, especially medicines which end epidemics and transmissible disease. We need education to be free. We need to end homelessness. We need to end pollution. We need to end nationalism, racism, xenophobia, sexism. We need freedom of speech, religion, print, association. We need to end war. There are a lot of things we as a society need. But we can't even make "p2p internet" work, and we already have it. (And please just forget the word 'distributed', because it's misleading you into thinking it's a transformative idea, when it's not)
- vladms 9mo ago
  I do not think free is attainable for everything due to thermodynamics constraints. Imagine "free energy". Everybody uses as much as they want, Earth heats up, things go bad (not far from what is actually happening!). I would settle for simpler, attainable things. Equal opportunity for next generation. Quality education for everybody. Focus on merit not other characteristics. Personal freedom if it does not infringe on the freedom of people around you (ex: there can't be such thing as a "freedom to pollute"). In my view Internet as p2p worked pretty well to improve the previous status quo in many areas (not all). But there will never be a "stable solution", life and humans are dynamic. We do have some good and free stuff on the Internet today because of the groundwork laid out 30 years ago by the open source movement. Any plan started today will have noticeable effect in many years. So "we can't even make" sounds more of an excuse to not start, rather than an honest take.

graeme 9mo ago

Entirely possible the rss failed validation triggered some spam flag that isn't documented, because documenting anti-spam rules lets spammers break the rules. The amount of spam has increased enormously and I have no doubt there are a number of such anti-spam flags and a number of false positive casualties along the way.

Eisenstein 9mo ago
If failing to validate a page because it is pointing to an RSS feed triggers a spam flag and de-indexes all of the rest of the pages, that seems important to fix. By losing legit content because of such an error they are lowering the legit:spam ratio thus causing more harm than a spam page being indexed. It might not appear so bad for one instance, but it is indicative of a larger problem.

bjt12345 9mo ago

What I find strange about Google, is that there's a lot of illegal advertising on Google maps - things like accomodation and liquor sellers that don't have permits. However, if they do it for the statutory term, they can then successfully apply for existing-use rights. Yet I've seen expert witnesses bring up Google pins on Maps during tribunal over planning permits and the tribunal sort of acts as if it's all legit. I've even seen the tribunals report publish screenshots from Google maps as part of their judgement.

deltoidmaximus 9mo ago
Reminds me of Trap streets or Trap towns that cartographers would use to watermark their maps and prove plagiarism. The trouble is reality would sometimes change to match the map.
oakwhiz 9mo ago
legal citogenesis?
- actionfromafar 9mo ago
  Clan justice, google is the clan.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
    Reality is just tug of war and weight is all that matters at the limit
rcxdude 9mo ago
Is it treated differently from other kinds of advertising? A lot of planning and permitting has a bit of a 'if it's known about and no-one's been complaining it's OK' kind of principle to it.
lunias 9mo ago
I was a victim of this when I moved into my house. Being unfamiliar with the area, I googled for a locksmith near me. It returned a result in a shopping center just about a mile away from me. I'd driven past that center before, it seemed entirely plausible that there was a locksmith in there. I called the locksmith and they came, but in an unmarked van, spent over an hour to change 2 locks, damaged both locks, and then tried to charge me like $600 because the locks were high security. It's actually a deal for me, y'know, these locks go for much more usually. I just paid them and immediately contacted my credit card company to dispute the charge. I called their office to complain and the lady answering the phone hung up on me multiple times. I drove to where the office was supposed to be, and there was no such office. I reported this to google maps and it did get removed very quickly, but this seems like something that should be checked or at least tied back to an actual person in some way for accountability. Then I went to the hardware store and re-changed all the locks myself.

throwaway984393 9mo ago

[dead]

FuturisticLover 9mo ago

Google search results have gone shit. I am facing some deindexing issues where Google is citing a content duplicate and picking a canonical URL itself, despite no similar content. Just the open is similar, but the intent is totally different, and so is the focus keyword. Not facing this issue in Bing and other search engines.

daemonologist 9mo ago
I've also noticed Google having indexing issues over the past ~year: Some popular models on Hugging Face never appear in the results, but the sub-pages (discussion, files, quants, etc.) do. Some Reddit pages show up only in their auto-translated form, and in a language Google has no reason to think I speak. (Maybe there's some deduplication to keep machine translations out of the results, but it's misfiring and discarding the original instead?)
- sischoel 9mo ago
  The issues with auto-translated Reddit pages unfortunately also happens with Kagi. I am not sure if this is just because Kagi uses Google's search index or if Reddit publishes the translated title as metadata. I think at least for Google there are some browser extensions that can remove these results.
  - black_puppydog 9mo ago
    The Reddit issue is also something that really annoys me and i wish kagi would find some way to counter it. Whenever I search for administrational things I do so in one of three languages, German, French or English depending on which context this issue arises in. And I would really prefer to only get answers that are relevant to that country. It's simply not useful for me to find answers about social security issues in the US when I'm searching for them in French.
- torben-friis 9mo ago
  Reddit auto translation is horrible. It’s an extremely frustrating feeling, starting to read something in your language believing it’s local, until you reach a weird phrase and realise it’s translated English. It’s also clearly confusing users, as you get replies in a random language, obviously made by people who read an auto translation and thought they were continuing the conversation in their native language.

digitalgravix 9mo ago

[dead]

huksley 9mo ago

I have the same issue with DollarDeploy and Bing (and consequently with DuckDuckGo which uses bing) Primary domain cannot be found via search - Bing knows about brand, LinkedIn, YouTube channel and but refuses to show search results about primary domain. Bing search console does not give any clue, force reindexing does not help. Google search works fine.

nottorp 9mo ago

I bet Google doesn't know why either...

DeathArrow 9mo ago
And it's not like they actually care enough to know why.
hackerbeat 9mo ago
Yeah. And they've now milked the whole web for AI and couldn't care less about the mess they made.

hyruo 9mo ago

I encountered the same problem. I also use the Bear theme, specifically Hugo Bear. Recently, my blog was unindexed by Bing. Using `site:`, there are no links at all. My blog has been running normally for 17 years without any issues before.

firefoxd 9mo ago

Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified. 1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking. 2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my search page. Basically people were searching for crypto and scammy websites on my blog. Odd, but not like they were finding anything. Turns out, their search query was displayed as an h1 on the page and crawled by google. I was basically displaying spam. I don't have much control over ai overview because disabling it means I don't appear in search at all. But for the spam, I could do something. I added a robot noindex on the search page. A week later, both impressions and clicks recovered. Edit: Adding write up I did a couple weeks ago https://idiallo.com/blog/how-i-became-a-spammer https://idiallo.com/blog/how-i-became-a-spammer

bootsmann 9mo ago
Sorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?
- firefoxd 9mo ago
  So the spammer would link to my search page with their query param: example.com/search?q=text+scam.com+text On my website, I'll display "text scam.com text - search result" now google will see that link in my h1 tag and page title and say i am probably promoting scams. Also, the reason this appeared suddenly is because I added support for unicode in search. Before that, the page would fail if you added unicode. So the moment i fixed it, I allowed spammers to have their links displayed on my page.
  - Calavar 9mo ago
    Reminds me of a recent story on scammers using search queries to inject their scam phone numbers into the h1 header on legitimate sites [1] [1] https://cyberinsider.com/threat-actors-inject-fake-support-numbers-into-official-brand-sites/ https://cyberinsider.com/threat-actors-inject-fake-support-n...

dazc 9mo ago

Breaking News: Google de-indexes random sites all of the time and there is often no obvious reason why. They also penalize sites in a way where pages are indexed but so deep-down that no one will ever find them. Again, there is often no obvious reason.

p410n3 9mo ago
Do you have any resources here? The /r/seo subreddit seems vers superficial coming from an web agency background so its hard to find legit cases versus obvious oversights. Often people make a post describing a legit sounding issue on there just to let it shine through that they are essentially doing seo spam.
- dazc 9mo ago
  It's something you'll experience if you publish many sites over time. Can't point to any definitive sources, many of the reputable search related blogs are now just Google shills.
  - Aachen 9mo ago
    Or if you search for content which you know exists on the web and it suddenly takes an unusual amount of coaxing (e.g. half a sentence in quotes, if you remember it correctly word for word) before it brings up the page you're looking for Like, isn't this a well-known thing that happens constantly no matter if you're a user or run any websites? Relying on search engine ranking algorithms is russian roulette for businesses sadly, at least unless you outbid the competition to show your own page as an advertisement when someone searches your business' name
skeptic_ai 9mo ago
[dead]
hackerbeat 9mo ago
Totally. They've completely lost the plot.

cabirum 9mo ago

In 2025, is it still prohibively expensive to run some community-supported crawler & search engine? Without Google censorship, ads, and ai.

mariusor 9mo ago
Based on marginalia's work I would say no, but maybe you're thinking of a different scale than they work at.

nmeofthestate 9mo ago

A weird thing: on the hacker news page, in firefox mobile, all the visited links are grey, but the link to this blog post won't turn grey even when visited.

quietfox 9mo ago

I'll be honest, I read "Google de-indexed my Bear Blog" and was looking forward to discovering an interesting blog about bears.

Bengalilol 9mo ago
Coming from a quietfox, it is OK. It is important to preserve oneself ^^.
xeonmc 9mo ago
You may find rather unexpected results if you look for blogs with an interest in bears.
binarymax 9mo ago
Same. I still don’t know why the word “Bear” was used in the title.
- saint_yossarian 9mo ago
  I guess they use this blogging platform: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/
  - binarymax 9mo ago
    Makes sense. Hadn't heard of that platform before but looks really nice.

Havoc 9mo ago

Parts of Google are all Blackbox-y. Never know when computer says no. And if they had usable ways to contact a human they’d just tell you they don’t know either

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

p410n3 9mo ago

I ran into the same thing! My site still isnt indexed and I would REALLY like to not change the URL (its a shop and the url is printed on stuff) - redirects are my last resort. But basically what happened: In august 2025 we finished the first working version of our shop. I wanted to accelerate indexing after some weeks because only ~50 of our pages were indexed and submitted the sitemap and everything got de-indexed within days. I thought for the longest time that its content quality because we sell niche trading cards and the descriptions are all one liners i made in Excel. ("This is $cardname from $set for your collection or deck!"). And because its single trading cards we have 7000+ products that are very similiar. (We did do all product images ourselves I thought google would like this but alas). But later we added binders, whole sets and took a lot of care with their product data. The frontpage also got a massive overhaul - no shot. Not one page in index. We still get traffic from marketplaces and our older non-shop site. The shop itself lives on a subdomain (shop.myoldsite.com). The normal site also has a sitemap but that one was submitted 2022. I later rewrote how my sitemaps were generated and deleted the old ones in search console hoping this would help. It did not. (The old sitemap was generated by the shop system and was very large. Some forums mentioned that its better to create a chunked sitemap so I made a script that creates lists with 1000 products at a time as well as an index for them.) Later observations are: - Both sitemaps i deleted in GSC are still getting crawled and are STILL THERE. You cant see them in the overview but if you have the old links they still appear as normal. - We eventually started submitting product data to google merchant center as well. It works 100% fine and our products are getting found and bought. The clicks still even show up in search console!!!! So I have a shop with 0 indexed pages in GSC that gets clicks every day. WTHeck? So like... I dont even know anymore. Maybe we also have to restart like the person in the blog did and move the shop to a new domain and NEVER give google a sitemap. If I really go that route I will probably delete the cronjob that creates the sitemap in case google finds it by itself. But also like what the heck? I have worked in a web agency for 5 years and created a new webpage about every 2-8 weeks so i roughly launached about 50-70 webpages and shops and i NEVER saw that happen. Is it an ai hallucinating? Is it anti spam gone too far? Is it a straight up bug that they dont see? Who knows. I dont (Good article though and I hope maybe some other people chime in and googlers browsing HN see this stuff).

motbus3 9mo ago

Without going into details. The company I work for has potentially millions of pages indexed. Despite new content being published everyday, since around the same October dates we are seeing a decrease in the number of indexed pages. We have a consultant for the topic but I am not sure how much of that conversation I could share publicly so I will refrain myself of doing so. But I think I can say that it is not only about data structure or quality. The changes in methodology applied by Google in September might be playing a stronger role than what people initially thought

p410n3 9mo ago
What "changes in methodology applied by Google in September" are you referring to? There surely is a public announcement that can be shared? Most curious to hear as a shop I built is experiencing massive issues since august / september 2025

inglor_cz 9mo ago

At the risk of sounding crazy, I de-indexed my blog myself and rely on the mailing list (which is now approaching 5000 subscribers) + reprints in several other online media to get traffic to me. On a good day, I get 5000 hits, which is quite a lot by Czech language community standards. Together with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, this removed a lot of pressure to conform to their unclear policies. Especially around 2019-21, it was completely unclear how to escape their digital guillotine which seemed to hit various people randomly. The deliverability problem still stands, though. You cannot be completely independent nowadays. Fortunately my domain is 9 years old.

Aachen 9mo ago
Similar here. I've removed my websites from Google so people would find that other engines can return more complete results. People can find the content using any other engine (or LLM) or links in relevant places. Using anything but the monopolist should pay off until it's no longer a monopoly, or at least not one abused to gain power in other markets like by advertising their browser product on the homepage and not allowing anyone else to advertise there (much less for free)

DeathArrow 9mo ago

We depend too much on Google.

qwertox 9mo ago

When I reload the page "https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-bear-blog-and-i-dont-know-why/ https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-b...", I get Request URL: https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-bear-blog-and-i-dont-know-why/ https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-b... Request Method: GET Status Code: 304 Not Modified So maybe it's the status code? Shouldn't that page return a 200 ok? When I go to blog.james..., I first get a 301 moved permanently, and then journal.james... loads, but it returns a 304 not modified, even if i then reload the page. Only when I fully sumbit the URL again in the URL-bar, it responds with a 200. Maybe crawling also returns a 304, and Google won't index that? Maybe prompt: "why would a 301 redirect lead to a 304 not modified instead of a 200 ok?", "would this 'break' Google's crawler?" > When Google's crawler follows the 301 to the new URL and receives a 304, it gets no content body. The 304 response basically says "use what you cached"—but the crawler's cache might be empty or stale for that specific URL location, leaving Google with nothing to index.

jorams 9mo ago
You get a 304 because your browser tells the server what it has cached, and the server says "nothing changed, use that". In browsers you can bypass the cache by using Ctrl-F5, or in the developer tools you can usually disable caching while they're open. Doing so shows that the server is doing the right thing. Your LLM prompt and response are worthless.
- qwertox 9mo ago
  When Chrome serves a cached page, like when you click a on this page and then navitate back or hit F5, it shows it like this: Request URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196076 Request Method: GET Status Code: 200 OK (from disk cache) I just thought that it would be worthwhile investigating in that direction.
  - jorams 9mo ago
    That's a different situation. The browser decides what to do depending on the situation and what was communicated about caching. Sometimes it sends a request to the server along with information about what it already has. Then it can get back a 304. Other times it already knows the cached data is fine, so it doesn't send a request to the server in the first place. The developer tools show this as a cached 200.

xnx 9mo ago

The author doesn't know the cause but states "The whole affair is Google’s fault"?

g947o 9mo ago
There are three possibilities: Author's fault, Google's fault, someone else's fault. From the post, while it is hard to completely rule out the possibility that author did something wrong, they likely did everything they could to remove the suspicion. I assume they consulted all documentation or other resources. Someone else's fault? It is unlikely, since there isn't (obviously) another party involved here. Which leaves us to Google's fault. Also, I mean, if a user can't figure out what's wrong, the blame should just go to the vendor by default for poor user experience and documentation.
- skeptic_ai 9mo ago
  [dead]
ImPostingOnHN 9mo ago
You're absolutely right, we should give google the opportunity to defend itself. What's the phone number google provides so their victims can speak directly with an informed googler to discuss it? What's that? Google doesn't publish a phone number for their victims to do that? They just victimize and hide? Okay then google, here's your chance: please reply to this-here post of mine, with a plausible explanation that convincingly exonerates you in light of the evidence against you. I'll check back in a few hours to see whether google has done so. Until they do, we can continue blaming them.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
jlarocco 9mo ago
Surely whether Google indexes a page or not is Google's decision?
9mo ago

scosman 9mo ago

How does one debug issues like this? I have a page that ranks well worldwide, but is completely missing in Canada. Not just poorly ranked, gone. It shows up #1 for keyword in the US, but won't show up with precise unique quotes in Canada.

ipaddr 9mo ago
Buy a .ca domain for seo results and point to existing content

Aldipower 9mo ago

Google search also favors large, well-known sites over newcomers. For sites that have a lot of competition, this is a real problem and leads to asymmetry and a chicken-and-egg problem. You are small/new, but you can't really be found, which means you can't grow enough to be found. At the same time, you are also disadvantaged because Google displays your already large competitors without any problems!

econ 9mo ago

I never really use it but there is a lot in the Yahoo index that google refuses to index. https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=blog.james-zhan.com&fr=yfp-hrmob&fr2=p%3Afp%2Cm%3Asb&.tsrc=yfp-hrmob&ei=UTF-8&fp=1&toggle=1&cop=mss https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=blog.james-zhan.com&fr=yfp...

guerrilla 9mo ago
I thought Yahoo! was just Bing now. The real Yahoo! died ages ago.
- econ 9mo ago
  I don't know and don't doubt it but the results don't match. (For me at least)

donatj 9mo ago

About six months ago Ahrefs recommended I remove some Unicode from the pathing on a personal project. Easy enough. Change the routing, set up permanent redirects for the old paths to the new paths. I used to work for an SEO firm, I have a decent idea of best practices for this sort of thing. BAM, I went from thousands of indexed pages to about 100 See screenshot: https://x.com/donatj/status/1937600287826460852 https://x.com/donatj/status/1937600287826460852 It's been six months and never recovered. If I were a business I would be absolutely furious. As it stands this is a tool I largely built for myself so I'm not too bothered but I don't know what's going on with Google being so fickle. Updated screenshots; https://x.com/donatj/status/1999451442739019895 https://x.com/donatj/status/1999451442739019895

dmboyd 9mo ago
It’s probably also reflective of the fact that google are throwing all their new resources at AI, as soon as you’ve hit cache invalidation you’re gone, and anything new that’s crawled is probably ranked differently in the post llm world.
AznHisoka 9mo ago
Lesson: if its working, dont fix it
motbus3 9mo ago
They already scouted all content they needed. Sites are now competition for their AI systems
mohas 9mo ago
exactly my experience, suddenly thousands of non indexed pages, never figured out why, had to disband the business as it was content website selling ads.
- account42 9mo ago
  Good riddance.
  - 9mo ago

watwut 9mo ago

I noticed google not being able to find smaller blogs a few years ago. The sort of blogs I used to like and read a lot - small irregular blog of an expert in something like cryptography, sociology etc kind of disappeared from the search. Then they disappeared for real. Even when I knew the exact name of article I was looking for google was unable to find it. And yes it still existed,

sethops1 9mo ago
I have noticed the same thing. And the blogs are still there, I checked, and marginalia returns them as top results when I search the relevant keywords. Google just really doesn't care.
iamnothere 9mo ago
Marginalia search is good for this. But generally it’s becoming a real problem due to Google’s dominance. Blog authors ought to look into web rings and crosslinks again to help each other out with discovery.

onetokeoverthe 9mo ago

[dead]

ZiiS 9mo ago

Bear witness that Google have bear away from bearing Bear blog.

searchlurch 9mo ago

[dead]

ErroneousBosh 9mo ago

Why do you care if Google indexes your site or not? I'm annoyed that mine even shows up on Google.

dmix 9mo ago

I find this thing sometimes works itself out. Just submit sitemaps and the usual stuff and be careful with your HTML.

luxuryballs 9mo ago

It’s weird that the number one search engine in modern times is so finicky, perhaps just has become way over-engineered and over-rigged. Just index the web, at a certain point they went from search engine to arbiter of what people can find.

runjake 9mo ago

This submission title is wrong. The Title should be what the post title is: "Google De-Indexed My Entire Bear Blog and I Don’t Know Why" Bearblog.dev is not de-indexed from Google. I can pull up results fine.

Popeyes 9mo ago

Had the same issue - we have a massive register of regulated services and Google was a help for people finding those names easily. But in August suddenly "Page is not indexed: Crawled – currently not indexed" shot up massively. We've tried all sorts to get them back into the index but with no help. It would be helpful if Google explained why they aren't indexed or have been removed. As with the blogpost every other search engine is fine.

AznHisoka 9mo ago
What url is your website if you dont mind sharing?

PrairieFire 9mo ago

Whether or not this specific author’s blog was de-indexed or de-prioritized, the issue this surfaces is real and genuine. The real issue at hand here is that it’s difficult to impossible to discover why, or raise an effective appeal, when one runs afoul of Google, or suspects they have. I shudder to use this word as I do think in some contexts it’s being overused, I think it’s the best word to use here though: the issue is really that Google is a Gatekeeper. As the search engine with the largest global market share, whether or not Google has a commercial relationship with a site is irrelevant. Google has decided to let their product become a Utility. As a Utility, Google has a responsibility to provide effective tools and effective support for situations like this. Yes it will absolutely add cost for Google. It’s a cost of doing business as a Gatekeeper, as a Utility. My second shudder in this comment - regulation is not always the answer. Maybe even it’s rarely the answer. But I do think when it comes to enterprises that have products that intentionally or unintentionally become Gatekeepers and/or Utilities, there should be a regulated mandate that they provide an acceptable level of support and access to the marketplaces they serve. The absence of that is what enables and causes this to perpetuate, and it will continue to do so until an entity with leverage over them can put them in check.

hirako2000 9mo ago
If they considered having some ethical responsibility they would at least tame the bidding war that turned a well paid ads for an existing, unrelated business show before the legitimate link, or limit it so that the search result to show the legitimate link on the first page. For certain popular sites, it doesn't. Those businesses got to pay the shelf tax if they want their published piece to ever be - not just seen, but reasonably - found when looking specifically for it.
_heimdall 9mo ago
The situation reads more like a monopoly issue rather than a gatekeeper issue. Because google owns the indexer and the search tool most used, they're really only gate keeping their own sandbox.
- ethbr1 9mo ago

neilv 9mo ago

> Second, the issue couldn’t be the quality or the quantity of the content. I came across some other pretty barebones Bear blogs that don’t have much content, and looked them up on Google, and they showed up in the results just fine. An example: Suggestion: Remember that many large companies are emergently shitty, with shitty processes, and individuals motivated to act in shitty ways. When a company is so powerful, this might be a time to think about solidarity. When you're feeling an unexplained injustice from them, sometimes saying "but you let X do it" could just throw X under the bus. Whether because a fickle process or petty actor simply missed X before, or because now they have new reason to double down and also punish the others (to CYA consistency, or, if petty, to assert their power now that you've questioned it).

foobarkey 9mo ago

Probably an intern (oh its 2025, maybe LLM?) messed up some spaghetti part and the async job for reindexing your site is failing since then and the on-call is busy taking mojito/the alert is silenced :)

storus 9mo ago

They probably don't know why it was de-indexed either, likely a bunch of unexplainable ML models flagged it.

ciferkey 9mo ago

Adding another data point from my own experience. I had a very similar case with my own blog which I detailed here: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/i-dont-want-to-play-the-seo-game/ https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/i-dont-want-to-play-the-seo... Gone through everything I can find, but nothing has made a difference for months now. Would love to hear any thoughts people have that aren't the usual checklist items. Good news is I still get some visitors through Kagi, DDG, and Bing.

arjie 9mo ago

Google is blackboxy about this and I understand why. SEO is an arms race and there's no advantage to them advertising what they use as signals of "this is a good guy". My blog (on Mediawiki) was deranked to oblivion. Exactly zero of my pages would index on Google. Some of it is that my most read content is about pregnancy and IVF and those are sensitive subjects that google requires some authorship credibility on. That's fair. But there were other posts that I thought were just normal blog posts of the form that you'd expect to be all right. But none of the search engines wanted anything to do with me. I talked to a friend[0] who told me it was probably something to do with the way MediaWiki was generating certain pages and so on, and I did all the things he recommended: * edit the sitemap * switch from the default site.tld/index.php/Page to site.tld/fixed-slug/Page * put in json+ld info on the page * put in meta tags The symptoms were exactly as described here. All pages crawled, zero indexed. The wiki is open to anonymous users, but there's no spam on it (I once had some for an hour before I installed RequestAccount). Finally, my buddy told me that maybe I just need to dump this CMS and use something else. I wondered if perhaps they need you to spend on their ads platform to get it to work so I ran some ads too as an experiment. Some $300 or so. Didn't change a thing. I really wanted things to be wiki-like so I figured I'd just write and no one would find anything and that's life. But one day I was bored enough that I wrote a wiki bot that reads each recently published page and adds a meta description tag to it. Now, to be clear, Google does delay reinstatement so that it's not obvious what 'solved' the problem (part of the arms race), but a couple of days later I was back in Google and now I get a small but steady stream of visits from there (I use self-hosted Plausible in cookie-free mode so it's just the Referer [sic] header). Overall, I get why they're what they are. And maybe there's a bunch of spammy Mediawiki sites out there or something. But I was surprised that a completely legitimate blog would be deranked so aggressively unless a bunch of SEO measures were taken. Fascinating stuff the modern world is. I suspect it has to do with the Mediawiki because the top-level of the domain was a static site and indexed right away! 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrhizor https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrhizor

FragrantRiver 9mo ago

This is not about bears at all. Very disappointed.

subpixel 9mo ago

Bearblog.dev keeps subdomains out of search indexes until it approves them, as a measure against hosting the sort of things that would get the whole system de-indexed. My guess is that they are more successful at suppressing subdomains than at getting them indexed. After all, they are not in control of what search engines do, they can only send signals. For reference, I have a simple community event site on bearblog.dev which has been up for months and is not in any search index.

hackerbeat 9mo ago

Don't take it personal. Google has lost control of its algo a long time ago already.

terrycody 9mo ago

This is a known Google soft penalty in order to contain spam contents and domains, but unfortunately, this thing penalized a lot of good, clean, and legit blogs, and when you caught this penalty, in 99% cases, you will never recovered. It will only shows 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,11, or simialr numbers when you site:yourdomain on Google. I found this thing around 2019, and it still exists till today. A way to identify this: first post more than 20-30 articles on your blog, and if after several months, it still shows only several pages when you site: your domain, then it mostly caught this thing. More info: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/anyone-site-only-4-results-indexed-penalty-now.1318746/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/anyone-site-only-4-results...

pentagrama 9mo ago

> Every time I published a new post, I would go to GSC and request indexing for the post URL, and my post would be on Google search results shortly after, as expected. I doubt this is the actual cause, but I can’t think of any other plausible explanation. One possibility is that repeatedly requesting manual indexing in GSC (Google Search Console), while the same URLs were also being discovered automatically through the sitemap, may have unintentionally triggered a spam or quality signal in Google’s indexing system. This kind of duplicated or aggressive indexing behavior could be misinterpreted by the algorithm, even if the content itself was legitimate.

eikowagenknecht 9mo ago

I‘m running a very small personal website / blog as well (https://eikowagenknecht.com https://eikowagenknecht.com) where I‘ve been writing about mostly home automation related things that I couldn’t see properly documented before, but also other topics sometimes. A typical page would be a migration guide for Home Assistant from a Pi 4 to Pi 5. These niche posts had their steady stream of visitors for years now, coming almost exclusively from Google. But August 25 2025, from one day to the other it dropped by about 95 percent and it has been that way ever since, from 1000 visitors per month to maybe 50. Nothing I tried SEO wise could fix it. Now I don’t need visitors for anything, but I‘m kind of sad that people who were clearly finding my content useful (I got lots of thank you mails and things like that) can’t find it any more. Nowadays, I get more traffic from Bing, Yandex.ru, DDG and Brave than from Google..

devil1432 9mo ago

I remember when I was 12yo, I used to create a lot of small fan pages, blogs and forums (with total of 10 users if I was lucky). They were always indexed by Google with no problem. I miss these simpler times. Nowadays, Internet is no longer democratic.

marbu 9mo ago

Run into a similar problem with my blog this year. After spending some time trying to resolve it, I just gave up. I can understand that every now and then Google changes it's rules and validation procedures, so that what used to work now gets removed from the index out of sudden, given their fight with spam and slop. But what I'm struggling to understand is how could Google crawler and Google Search Console be so bad so that: * google crawler stops fetching sitemap out of sudden, even though Google claims it's an important signal for the search engine * requesting sitemap refresh via GSC fails on "unknown" error, which is puzzling considering according to my web logs, nobody tried to load it between my request and the error * after fixing an error, validation job gets stuck for weeks, only to fail for unclear error * random deindexing events as explained in the post And I don't buy the argument that this is necessary for Google to deal with spam, because Bing Webmaster Tools just works flawlessly, and they have to deal with it as well. I don't understand how a small business deal with this kind of issues.