https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/blog-de-indexed-by-google/
I read a November 7, 2025 post by James Zhan about his blog (hosted on Bear Blog) being de-indexed by Google. As a threshold matter, I note that Mr. Zhan has a nice-looking and well-structured personal blog. He describes discovering on October 14, 2025, that his blog, which had previously been indexed by Google, had been de-indexed. He tried various forms of troubleshooting to resolve the issue, but it was not resolved as of December 7. Mr. Zhan did helpfully note that his blog remained indexed by Bing and Brave Search, suggesting that the issue was localized to Google (I will add it is good to see that being de-indexed by Google does not affect Brave).
Long-time readers of my work may recall that I went through a similarly annoying experience when Bing de-indexed The New Leaf Journal in January 2023 (see my initial report). Bing only began fixing the situation in July of that year and never provided an explanation for what happened. I came to suspect that the reason why Bing addressed my multiple emails at all was because I created a GitHub repository collecting Bing de-indexing stories and shared by GitHub repository to Hacker News (I received my first human contact from Bing within 24 hours of sharing my repo to HN). For whatever it is worth, I suppose that I was fortunate to only be de-indexed by Bing instead of Google. The Bing indexing hurt us more because it removed us from DuckDuckGo (which is effectively a Bing front-end) than Bing itself. DuckDuckGo is our second-biggest search referrer, but it typically comes in at 8-10% of our Google referrals. (Note this blog receives very little search traffic, and most of it is from the Bing family.)
Regarding Mr. Zhan’s case, I would not have recommended his decision to copy is blog to a new sub-domain (I doubt that will be the solution to the problem), although I approve of changing his domain registrar from GoDaddy to Porkbun (I am a Porkbun fan). The big tech search engines are fickle things, and the quality of Mr. Zhan’s blog in conjunction with the fact that neither Bing nor Brave de-indexed it suggests the problem was (and perhaps is) Google being Google. There is probably no good reason for the de-indexing and Google will never offer a reason.
Because I enjoyed the post, I submitted it to Hacker News (it probably worked for me and is known to have worked for others with respect to Bing). I hope his blog is re-indexed soon (if it has not been already).
