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

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 loke 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.

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.

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've even seen the tribunals report publish screenshots from Google maps as part of their judgement.

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.

I encountered the same problem. I also use the Bear theme, specifically Hugo Bear. Recently, my blog was unindexed by Bing. Using `site:`, there are no links at all. My blog has been running normally for 17 years without any issues before.

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.

I bet Google doesn't know why either...

I have the same issue with DollarDeploy and Bing (and consequently with DuckDuckGo which uses bing)

Primary domain cannot be found via search - Bing knows about brand, LinkedIn, YouTube channel and but refuses to show search results about primary domain.

Bing search console does not give any clue, force reindexing does not help. Google search works fine.

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

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 graphs.

Content is ephemeral but can also live forever if any nodes keep rebroadcasting it. Every post has a unique ID, so you can search for it later in the swarm or some persistent index utility.

The Internet should have become fully p2p. That would have been magical. But platforms stole the limelight just as the majority of the rest of the world got online.

If we nerds had but a few more years...

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