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).

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

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.

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

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.

We depend too much on Google.

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

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...

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.

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.

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 :)