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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

#81

Post by donatj »

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 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

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

#82

Post by indymike »

firefoxd wrote: post #32
bootsmann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 th…

This has been a trick used by "reputation management" people for years.

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

#83

Post by watwut »

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,

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

#84

Post by jorams »

qwertox wrote: post #80
jorams wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#85

Post by jdiff »

layer8 wrote: post #79
firefoxd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

What does Unicode have to do with links?

Lot of spam uses unicode, either for non-English languages or just to swap in lookalike characters to try and dodge keyword filters.

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

#86

Post by dmboyd »

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…

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.

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

#87

Post by AznHisoka »

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…

Lesson: if its working, dont fix it

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

#88

Post by torben-friis »

daemonologist wrote: post #12
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.

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 disca…

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.

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

#89

Post by saint_yossarian »

binarymax wrote: post #66
quietfox wrote: post #38

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

Same. I still don’t know why the word “Bear” was used in the title.

I guess they use this blogging platform: https://bearblog.dev/

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

#90

Post by deltoidmaximus »

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.…

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.
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