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

journal.james-zhan.com

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

#151

Post by mohas »

donatj wrote: post #81

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 It's b…

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.

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

#152

Post by firefoxd »

Goofy_Coyote wrote: post #108
firefoxd wrote: post #22

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 se…

Question: If I do a search for say crypto on your blog, how does Google gets to index the resulting page? I’m imagining something like “blog.example/?s=crypto” which only I should see, not Google. Edit: Where they linking to your website from their own? (In that case the link with the bad search keywords can be crawled)

They are spamming other websites with links to my website like in your example. Google crawl those other websites, follow the spammy link to mine, and I get penalized for having a page with spam content.

The solution is to tell the crawler that my search page shouldn't be indexed. This can be done with the robots meta tags.

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

#153

Post by ciferkey »

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.

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

#154

Post by socalgal2 »

lunias wrote: post #111
bjt12345 wrote: post #6

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 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 th…

Just curious, if you were Google, how would you fix this? And take the question seriously, because it's harder than it sounds.

They are certainly trying. It's not good for them to have fake listings.

https://podcast.rainmakerreputation.com/2412354/episodes/169...

(just googled that, didn't listen, was looking for a much older podcast from I think Reply All from like 10yrs ago)

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

#155

Post by arjie »

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

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

#156

Post by _heimdall »

ethbr1 wrote: post #143
_heimdall wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's entirely possible to have utility-importance non-monopoly gatekeepers, which is part of the legal issue. The US regulates monopolies. The US regulates utilities, defined by ~1910 industries. It doesn't generally regulate non-monopoly companies that are gatekeepers. Hence, Apple/Google/Facebook et al. have been able to avoid regulation by avoiding being classed as monopolies. Imho, the EU is taking the right appr…

Sure, we agree there though I'd add that while the US regulates monopolies we don't always enforce that, we also allow state-sponsored monopolies for many regional utilities.

With Google and SEO I see it more in the monopoly camp though. The existence of other big tech companies doesn't break the monopoly Google has by owning search, ads, analytics, et al under the same umbrella.

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

#157

Post by lunias »

socalgal2 wrote: post #154
lunias wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Just curious, if you were Google, how would you fix this? And take the question seriously, because it's harder than it sounds. They are certainly trying. It's not good for them to have fake listings. https://podcast.rainmakerreputation.com/2412354/episodes/169... (just googled that, didn't listen, was looking for a much older podcast from I think Reply All from like 10yrs ago)

It definitely sounds like a hard problem. I'm not familiar with the current process, but based on what I found when I looked it up, it seems like there is a verification step already in place, but some of the methods of verification are tenuous. The method that seems the most secure to me is delivering a pin to the physical location that's being registered, but I feel like everything is exploitable.

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

#158

Post by nolito »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #146
Barbing wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. What could Google do to mitigate?

You noindex search pages or anything user generated, it's really that simple

Not enough. According to this article (https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/pludselig-dukkede-nyhed-op-d... you probably need to translate) its enough to link to an authorative site that accepts a query parameter. Googles AI picks up the query parameter as a fact. The artile is about a danish compay probably circumventing sanctions and how russian actors manipulate that fact and turn it around via Google AI

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

#160

Post by qwertox »

jorams wrote: post #84
qwertox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Request Method: GET Status Code: 200 OK (from disk cache) I just thought that it would be worthwhile investigating in that direction.

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.

Got it, thanks for explaining.
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