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Posted by nafnlj 12/12/2025

Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why(journal.james-zhan.com)
433 points | 189 commentspage 2
inglor_cz 12/12/2025|
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 12/12/2025|
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)
Aldipower 12/12/2025||
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!
nottorp 12/12/2025||
I bet Google doesn't know why either...
DeathArrow 12/12/2025||
And it's not like they actually care enough to know why.
hackerbeat 12/12/2025||
Yeah. And they've now milked the whole web for AI and couldn't care less about the mess they made.
dazc 12/12/2025||
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 12/12/2025||
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 12/12/2025||
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 12/12/2025||
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

hackerbeat 12/12/2025|||
Totally. They've completely lost the plot.
skeptic_ai 12/12/2025||
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huksley 12/12/2025||
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.

scosman 12/12/2025||
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 12/12/2025|
Buy a .ca domain for seo results and point to existing content
cabirum 12/12/2025||
In 2025, is it still prohibively expensive to run some community-supported crawler & search engine? Without Google censorship, ads, and ai.
mariusor 12/12/2025|
Based on marginalia's work I would say no, but maybe you're thinking of a different scale than they work at.
runjake 12/12/2025||
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.

xnx 12/12/2025||
The author doesn't know the cause but states "The whole affair is Google’s fault"?
g947o 12/12/2025||
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 12/12/2025||
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ImPostingOnHN 12/12/2025|||
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.

Popeyes 12/12/2025|||
Well they are calling out for help and seeing if others have had the same problem. And you can see from the responses that there are people having the same. So we are either all messing up despite not doing anything different. So Google has messed up something and we are all suffering because of it.
jlarocco 12/12/2025||
Surely whether Google indexes a page or not is Google's decision?
motbus3 12/12/2025|
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 12/12/2025|
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
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