> ## Content Index
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# Google Decided to Index My Blog Again
- URL: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/google-decided-to-index-my-blog-again/
- Published: 2026-09-08T11:35:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T11:35:52.000Z
- Description: No one, not even Google, knows when a site is indexed or not. Thankfully there are other search engines out there.
- Author: Matthew Brunelle
- Tags: Google, Writing

#### On this page

In June last year I [remade my blog using Ghost after some time off](https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/all-personal-blogs-die-but-mine-came-back-as-a-ghost/). I also [celebrated 15 years of blogging by bringing back some old posts](https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/blog-paleontology-15-years-of-blogging/). However, I realized the way I did that was a [big mistake for Google indexing](https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/i-dont-want-to-play-the-seo-game/). Since the old site's hosting had been broken for a bit, relaunching my site and changing the blog engine at the same time made it look like [expired domain abuse](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com#expired-domains).

Since May of last year the search console shows all of my pages as "Crawled - currently not indexed." I had a couple of posts that ended up on the Hacker News front page and they were briefly indexed. I got clicks during that window, but the pages were de-indexed a week later.

After triple checking all the common reasons why I might not be indexed, I decided to try screaming into the gaping void that is Google support. When Google mysteriously disowns you, there is no way to contact them. I [posted](https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/386714012?hl=en&sjid=13193020450334658785-NA&ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com) on the support forums and was told it didn't look like there were any penalties. They said "Once Google re-evaluates your site quality, indexing should resume naturally." The suggested resolution was to just wait and stare out into the far distance. The thread was locked.

Indeed, it seems I just had to wait another *9 months*:

![google_impressions.png](https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/content/images/2026/09/google_impressions.png)

The clicks and page views are slowly starting to trickle in. At this point getting indexed by Google is nice, but not as important as I thought it was before.

---

# The numbers

At first I self hosted Umami analytics. Then when [Ghost 6.0 launched](https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/ghost-6-0-activitypub-is-a-go/) I got access to the built-in analytics. So I have web traffic dating back to November.

Ignoring spikes like landing on a weird AI-generated mailing list, most of my traffic is marked as "direct". Those are probably people like me that block trackers. Honestly, they are the kind of people I most want to read my site.

After that, the next biggest source of the traffic is Hacker News when other people happen to submit my posts. (Thank you!) Traditional social, the non-aggregators, is only 8% of traffic. I don't use social media, so that's not a source I push.

If you remove those top sources, half of my traffic comes from search. It's much smaller than the spikes, but a stable source of visitors:

| Engine       | % of search |
| ------------ | ----------- |
| DuckDuckGo   | 59.1%       |
| Google       | 15.3%       |
| Kagi         | 9.2%        |
| Bing         | 5.6%        |
| Brave Search | 5.0%        |
| Ecosia       | 2.5%        |
| Yandex       | 1.7%        |
| Qwant        | 1.7%        |

Google is only 15% of those views! Instead, the privacy focused search engines are \~75% of the traffic.

That's because after Google wouldn't index me, I set myself up on sites like Kagi's smallweb, personalsit.es, bubbles.town, blogroll.org, etc. The result is that I can get wide coverage in terms of search engines. It's nice not to be under the thumb of Google.

---

# I'll keep on writing

I have no clue why Google decided to index me again. All I can say is that practicing how to write quality content and actually writing regularly is probably the best way to get indexed by any search engine. If you're reading this, regardless of how you got here, thank you for taking the time.