Google Web Indexing: Some Think It Is Degrading. Impossible
December 25, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I think Google’s Web indexing is the cat’s pajamas. It is the best. It has the most Web pages. It digs deep into sites few people visit like the Inter-American Foundation. Searches are quick, especially if you don’t use Gemini which seems to hang in dataspace today (December 12, 2025).
Imagine my reaction when I read that a person using a third-party blog publishing service was de-indexed. Now the pointer is still there, but it is no longer displayed by the esteemed Google system. You can read the human’s version of the issue he encountered in “Google De-Indexed My Entire Bear Blog and I Don’t Know Why.”
Google has brightened the day of a blogger. Google understands advertising. Some other things are bafflers to Googzilla. Thanks, Qwen. Good enough, but you spelled “de-indexed” correctly.
The write up reveals the issue. The human clicked on something and Google just followed its rules. Here’s the “why” from the source document:
On Oct 14, as I was digging around GSC, I noticed that it was telling me that one of the URLs weren’t indexed. I thought that was weird, and not being very familiar with GSC, I went ahead and clicked the “Validate” button. Only after did I realized that URL was the RSS feed subscribe link,
https://blog.james-zhan.com/feed/?type=rss, which wasn’t even a page so it made sense that it hadn’t been indexed, but it was too late and there was no way for me to stop the validation.
The essay explains how Google’s well crafted system responded to this signal to index an invalid url. Google could have taken time to add a message like “Are you sure?” or maybe a statement saying, “Clicking okay will cause de-indexing of the content at the root url.” But Google — with its massive amounts of user behavior data — knows that its interfaces are crystal clear. The vast majority of human Googlers understand what happens when they click on options to delete images from the Google Cloud. Or, when a Gmail user tries to delete old email using the familiar from: command.
But the basic issue is that a human caused the de-indexing.
What’s interesting about the human’s work around is that those actions could be interpreted as a gray or black hat effort to fiddle with Google’s exceptional approach to indexing. Here’s what the human did:
I copied my blog over to a different subdomain (you are on it right now), moved my domain from GoDaddy to Porkbun for URL forwarding, and set up URL forwarding with paths so any blog post URLs I posted online will automatically be redirected to the corresponding blog post on this new blog. I also avoided submitting the sitemap of the new blog to GSC. I’m just gonna let Google naturally index the blog this time. Hopefully, this new blog won’t run into the same issue.
I would point out that “hope” is not often an operative concept at the Google.
What’s interesting about this essay about a human error is that it touched a nerve amongst the readers of Hacker News. Here a few comments about this human error:
- PrairieFire offers this gentle observation: “Whether or not this specific author’s blog was de-indexed or de-prioritized, the issue this surfaces is real and genuine. The real issue at hand here is that it’s difficult to impossible to discover why, or raise an effective appeal, when one runs afoul of Google, or suspects they have. I shudder to use this word as I do think in some contexts it’s being overused, I think it’s the best word to use here though: the issue is really that Google is a Gatekeeper.
- FuturisticLover is a bit more direct: “Google search results have gone sh*t. 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.
- Aldipower raises a question about excellence and domination of Web search technology: Yeah, Google search results are almost useless. How could they have neglected their core competence so badly?
Several observations are warranted:
- Don’t click on any Google button unless one does one’s homework. Interpreting Google speak without having fluency in the lingo can result in some interesting downstream consequences
- Google is unlikely to change due to its incentive programs. One does not get promoted for fixing up an statement that could lead to a site being removed from public view. One gets the brass ring for doing AI which hopefully works more reliably that Gemini today (December 12, 2025)
- Quite a few people posting to this Hacker News’ item don’t have the same level of affection I have for the scintillating Google search experience.
Net net: Get with the program. The courts have spoken in the US. The EU just collects money. Users consume ads. Adapt. My suggestion is to not screw around too much; otherwise, Bear Blogs might be de-indexed by an annoyed search administrator in Switzerland.
Stephen E Arnold, December 25, 2025
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