A wiki operator reports sudden near-total Google deindexing after 15 years of normal operation, with no actionable explanation in Search Console.
Key Takeaways
Google Search Console shows URLs as “crawled but not indexed” with no specific reason provided and no manual action flag.
The affected subdomain had functioned normally for 15 years before the sudden drop.
The wiki hosts 37k+ pages, runs active spam moderation, Cloudflare rules, and restricted new-account permissions.
No 403 errors from Googlebot appear in Search Console, ruling out a crawler block as the cause.
Hacker News Comment Review
Multiple independent site owners report the same “crawled but not indexed” status on personal blogs and small wikis, suggesting this is not isolated to one operator or niche.
Commenters split between blaming Google-side indexing jank affecting a small percentage of sites silently, and blaming wiki spam vectors that poison domain trust even when moderation appears strong.
A recurring concern: Google has already scraped training data from these sites, reducing its incentive to send referral traffic, though this remains speculative.
Notable Comments
@marginalia_nu: argues Google’s crawl/index pipeline makes it easy to silently exclude 0.1% of sites with no internal detection.
@ZeWaka: small game wiki with no public signups also vanished from Google results ~3 weeks ago, even when searching the direct URL.
