Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by leoedin » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

cyberrock wrote: post #14

p0w3n3d wrote: post #2

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

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.

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.

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

#22

Post by firefoxd » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

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

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

#23

Post by Eisenstein » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:03 AM UTC

graeme wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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

#24

Post by oakwhiz » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:12 AM UTC

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.…

legal citogenesis?

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

#25

Post by vladms » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:17 AM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #11

echelon wrote: post #4

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 gra…

There is a technological feudalism being built in an ongoing manner, and you and I cannot do anything with it. On the other side of the same coin there are already governments that will make you legally responsible of what your page's visitors write in comments. This renders any p2p internet legally unbearable (i.e. someone goes to your page, posts some bad word and you get jailed). So far they say "it's only for big…

Depends what your times scale is for "being built". 50 years ago the centralization and government control were much stronger. 20 years ago probably less.

"cannot do anything" is relative. Google did something about it (at least for the first 10-15 years) but I am sure that was not their primary intention nor they were sure it will work. So "we have no clue what will work to reduce it" is more appropriate.

Now I think everybody has tools to build stuff easier (you could not make a television or a newspaper 50 years ago). That is just an observation of possibility, not a guarantee of success.

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

#26

Post by bootsmann » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:22 AM UTC

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…

Sorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?

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

#27

Post by dazc » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:23 AM UTC

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.

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

#28

Post by vladms » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:27 AM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #8

echelon wrote: post #4

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 gra…

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 fr…

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.

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

#29

Post by dazc » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:28 AM UTC

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…

Sounds like point 2 was a negative seo attack. It could be that your /?s page is being cached and getting picked up via crawlers.

You can avaoid this by no caching search pages and applying noindex via X-robots tag https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

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

#30

Post by dev_l1x_be » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 8:30 AM UTC

FuturisticLover wrote: post #9

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.

Amazong, Google is the same. Fake products, fake results, scammers left and right.