Google De-Indexed My Blog

Background

Usually, when you care about SEO (though phrasing it as an “SEO requirement” sounds a bit odd), you register your domain on Google Search Console. Besides submitting a sitemap, it helps Google discover and index your site faster, while letting you troubleshoot issues flagged by Google’s search engine.

Bing offers a similar service called Bing Webmaster Tools.

Starting around November 2024, I noticed that my blog’s impressions had been on a steep decline since around May 2024.

During this period, I hadn’t made any code changes to my blog, and Search Console showed zero errors—ruling out structural issues for the time being.

Still, I couldn’t fathom what kind of content could justify Google wiping my articles from its index entirely.

Investigating the Root Cause

Back in May 2024, I had over 700 indexed pages. By mid-November, that number had plummeted to around 100, and by the end of the year, a mere 20 or so pages remained.

This sequence of events left me completely baffled. Beyond the fact that the dashboard showed no issues, even when I requested Google to recrawl, the status invariably came back as “Crawled - currently not indexed.” According to official Google documentation:

The page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; there is no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.

It tells you next to nothing. So I looked into other sources, such as this article, which noted that unindexed pages are fairly normal for smaller sites, and that one should focus on content quality and SEO optimization.

Yet after scouring the web, I couldn’t find cases quite like mine—where impressions were totally fine, only to suddenly drop off a cliff alongside a complete removal of indexing.

At this point, I can’t help but criticize Google. All kinds of low-quality AI content farms dominate top search spots, while genuinely useful personal blogs end up mysteriously purged.

Not to mention that when you click on some of those content farms, you’re immediately bombarded with intrusive redirect ads. In contrast, several of my previously popular articles included:

• A deep dive into HTML FormData
• Rethinking third-party cookies and CORS
• My experience working as a software engineer in Fukuoka
• A review of Zeabur’s one-click deployment service

These posts, which I consider genuinely helpful and used to rank immediately for relevant keywords, were stripped away by Google overnight. It made me realize all too clearly that I can’t rely solely on Google’s SEO traffic to keep my site visible.

Google SEO Trends

Because of the dropped impressions and de-indexing, I started looking into what else I needed to pay attention to beyond standard developer SEO fundamentals (like SSR, meta tags, ld-json, sitemaps).

I stumbled upon this comprehensive piece by awoo: Where is E-Commerce SEO Headed in the Post-HCU and AI Overviews Era?. It thoroughly breaks down the development of AI and the evolution of SEO strategies. Highly recommended.

If you want to truly learn SEO, you don’t need to spend a fortune on SEO courses. If you are familiar with web development and have full control over your code (i.e., you can edit the HTML directly), you can learn most SEO essentials straight from Google’s official guide.

In short, while Google repeatedly claims to reward “helpful content,” the actual search results tell a different story. Major brands easily dominate rankings, while genuine expert content gets pushed aside.

Google’s continuous algorithmic updates aim to surface useful content, but the outcome hasn’t matched expectations—in fact, it has decimated many small websites. Several sites mentioned in that article experienced similar avalanche-like drops in impressions.

Looking for clues in the awoo article, the most plausible culprit for my site might be a lack of topical focus. While my blog is predominantly technical (software engineering), it also weaves in personal reflections, opinions, and life updates. Perhaps that caused the drop in visibility. But going back to my original frustration: de-indexing the entire site over that makes zero sense.

My Attempt: Rewriting and Migrating Domains

Starting in December 2024, I rewrote the entire blog. In addition to refreshing the design, I revamped the URL structure, optimized JSON-LD data, touched up various SEO aspects, and migrated to a new domain.

Switching domains was a tough decision. kalan.dev holds a lot of memories for me; I bought it right when Google launched the .dev top-level domain, and it has been with me for over five years.

After migrating to dev.kalanlife.com and setting up 301 redirects, Google actually indexed my posts within two days. But two days later, Google once again de-indexed all my articles, citing the exact same reason: “Crawled - currently not indexed.”

Whether this approach truly didn’t work or it simply hasn’t had enough time to show results remains to be seen. Given the situation, I decided to move the domain back to the familiar blog.kalan.dev, keeping the new design and architecture, to see if things improve over time.

Taking Matters into My Own Hands

From emailing Google to asking the community for help, I’ve tried everything. Since I likely won’t see results anytime soon, I’m pivoting my approach to running this blog. Here are a few strategies moving forward:

• Whenever I publish a new article, promote it across various social platforms as much as possible. Sometimes Threads actually ranks better (even if I’m not a big fan of it).
• Build out a newsletter and community.
• Encourage people to ditch Google in favor of DuckDuckGo or Bing—both can actually find my website.

Personally, I’d recommend DuckDuckGo. The interface is much cleaner without all the cluttered news headlines you see on Bing, and it doesn’t track your behavior.

I will keep using my own website to voice my thoughts and publish posts, and I sincerely appreciate all your support! If you enjoy my articles, please consider subscribing via RSS!