Could Your Site’s Google Search Entry Suddenly Disappear ? A Salutary Tale for the Unwary...

The short answer to what might be quite a disturbing question for many, sadly, is: Quite possibly.....

Let me explain why.

First, a bit of background.

In common with many others, I first started posting to the net back in 2021 when the pandemic was still periodically keeping us legally under house arrest for up to 23 hours a day.

Amongst other things, as someone with experience in the immunology field, I wanted to create a widely-available platform to share ideas on possible strategies for vaccine development that bypassed the over-lengthy conventional journal publication procedure. Since funding was also an issue, I decided to use Google’s Sites offering, which had been recently upgraded, and I knew could be used free of charge to set up a website.

To cut a long story short, having set up a site successfully, and even written a manual to explain how others could do it, it took 1 year and 3 months to get my site indexed – you can see a history of this ridiculously long wait, and what I did to try and shorten it, in a previous blog. While becoming increasingly frustrated with the long wait, I also opened a blog using the old blogspot platform; this is also a Google product, but unlike Sites, comes with a free domain of its own.

On delving a bit further into SEO at the time, I discovered that although Google didn’t seem prepared to index sites or blogs created using either of its own products this side of doomsday, everyone else was, with index entries for both website and blog appearing on all the other major search engines within 3 months of setting up the site.

This provided me with my first important lesson about the Google indexing system – don’t expect to see any new, or even recent, material if you use it exclusively, as most people do,  in preference to the other search engines. Once I had reconciled myself to living with this realisation, and having finally got my site indexed a year in, I continued to use Google search selectively, but switching back to Bing when I wanted the most up to date material, and also using one of the composite engines for a wider reach or incognito browsing.

So far so good, and sorted, you might say, with permanent index entries established for both of my internet sites…but there unfortunately you’d be wrong.

Back in June of last year, I happened to check Google to see how recently my site and blog entries had been updated…imagine my annoyance when I found that both had been completely expunged from the index. To try and sort out why this had happened, I first resorted to Google Search Console and put in a request for re-indexing…no result, and even worse, no help at all in explaining why it had happened.

The next port of call, which was a little more informative, was Google’s AI engine, Gemini. I reckoned that if anyone should know what was going on with Google’s indexing bots', it would…

Gemini was actually surprisingly frank about some key information that I would expect its parent organisation would want to conceal…namely that Google Search had changed its indexing policy in May 2025 to restrict indexing to certain categories of site, and thereby exclude significant amounts of material. This was ostensibly 'in order to improve users’ search experience’, but I suspect it was really to protect Google's index against overloading. It also confirmed that none of the other search engines applied this sort of 'filter', hence the disparity of coverage.

Whatever the reason for the change, it seemed to me to be a form of covert censorship – i.e. Google presenting us with what it ‘thought was good for us’ rather than what we actually wanted to see – i.e. a full range of indexed material which was as up to date as possible.

Although the results were both implicitly insulting and annoying for me as a website owner, what my research did provide was an explanation of why Google had suddenly dropped my index entries – basically it had applied its new policies and didn’t think either my site or blog were interesting or useful enough to bother presenting to its users.....

Although I’ve never been one for ‘blowing my own trumpet’, I think this decision was at best questionable – as users who have got as far as reading this article will already know, my blog is designed to be thought provoking and informative, and frequently deals with important issues of the day - and usually in some depth. My website also provides some useful and regularly updated info on a whole range of topics, and free access to some useful app downloads via my GDrive. I’ll leave the reader to decide what they think about Google’s indexing policy in the light of this article, and about the blog/website's content if they choose to sample them.

What is the message I’d like to convey to others ?

In short, don’t rely on Google Search exclusively if you want:

a)      1) The information you’re presented with to be up to date – it’s obvious from my experience that Google Search must be missing the newest sites, given the glacial nature of its crawler bots. It’s obviously severely overloaded and can’t cope with the extent of 'processing' it’s trying to do on new and existing entries in order to curate them for users as it thinks fit.

b)      2) To see information derived from a full range of subjects – given that Google’s algorithms remain as obscure as ever, it’s impossible to say what they’re excluding and why, so steer clear if you want an ‘uncensored’ view of the web.  (It's of note that Gemini itself admitted that it was bad policy to use Google exclusively as your search engine, as so many people still do.)

What would I recommend in the light of this?

1)     a) Switch your pc and phone’s default search engine to one of the others – there are plenty available. MS’s Bing or DuckDuckGo are reasonable alternatives, and both seem to index new material quickly in my experience.

2)     b) If you want to use Google’s AI offering (Gemini) specifically in preference to the other LLMs, use a direct link to its website, and be aware that it may be confining some of its source material to Google’s index. I have been impressed at the depth of some of the answers that Gemini provides, and it is to be recommended as a useful research tool, provided you're prepared to validate its answers independently.

3)    c)  If you have a site or blog that’s not on Google index, don’t bother striving to find ways of getting it indexed – you’ll almost certainly fail*, and will probably never find out why. Instead direct your efforts to providing your URLs to anyone likely to want to use them via other means.

Why has all this happened, and what are the prospects for search engines generally, given the vast increases in internet traffic expected ?

Over the last year or so, Google seem to have been losing search ‘market share’ to the opposition. It’s probably no coincidence that DuckDuckGo had a concerted TV and social media ad campaign last year and will no doubt have picked up some Google users already disgruntled at losing their index citations. The timing of Google’s indexing revamp suggests it may have been a last ditch attempt to woo ‘defectors’ back into the fold, by 'beefing up' its offering. By the look of the internet computing forums, it’s actually done the reverse, with many ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’-type entries bewailing loss of their sites’ index entries appearing since the event last year. I suspect the word on this will continue to spread, and Google will be hard pressed to retain its following if it doesn’t mend its ways….and soon.

If you've not actually checked your site/blog's google index entry recently, I'd recommend you do so...hopefully you won't get a nasty surprise as I did....

First published 14.3.26 Revised 11.4.26

* Some very recent experience has shown that certain phrases do seem to attract the Bots' attention and get past the censor.  If you are desperate to get your site onto the index, it might be worth a try....although I can now report that after a few days, a new blog entry which appeared quickly after I changed the blog's URL has disappeared again, no doubt as a result of the censor's renewed attention. All the more reason to avoid Google Search if you want a complete picture.....