A wiki/community site reports a sudden catastrophic drop in Google indexing, going from ~511k indexed pages to ~11 with no clear explanation.
Key Takeaways
Google Search Console shows URLs as “crawled but not indexed” with no reason given and no apparent fix available.
The site appears to be a wiki, making it structurally high-risk for SEO due to spam exposure and duplicate content signals.
The deindexing happened without manual action notices, suggesting an algorithmic or crawl-pipeline change.
Operators have no reliable escalation path when Google silently drops indexing at scale.
Hacker News Comment Review
Consensus leans toward Google jank over intentional targeting: subtle crawler or indexing pipeline bugs can silently exclude 0.1% of sites, hard to detect except from affected parties.
Wiki operators face compounding risk: spam infiltration degrades domain quality signals, and even CAPTCHAs fail against modern spammers; blocking signup email domains is cited as more effective.
A recurring theme is post-scraping abandonment: once Google trains models on content, incentive to surface the original source diminishes, raising structural questions for content publishers.
Notable Comments
@marginalia_nu: Shares firsthand experience of a silent HEAD-request bug causing mass deindexing on his own crawler, illustrating how easily pipeline errors go undetected.
@p4bl0: Personal blog deindexed after years of ranking; Search Console shows crawled-not-indexed with no actionable remedy offered.
@judah: 20-year-old personal blog lost all Google visibility last year, same “crawled but not indexed” status with no reason given.
