Google De-Indexed My Entire Blog Overnight – What I Learned (and What You Can Do)

Here’s what I learned when my entire blog urls disappeared from Google Search overnight and how I’m trying to fix it.

I woke up one morning, logged into Google Search Console, and saw something that made my stomach drop, there were ZERO pages indexed.

My new Blogger blog wasn’t even a week old, but just the day before, 11 of my posts were indexed and starting to show impressions. Now? Gone. No warnings. No explanations.

A blogger looking frustrated at Google Search Console showing 0 indexed pages and 26 URLs found.

The only faint silver lining? GSC was now for the first time detecting all 26 URLs on my blog but none of them were indexed. Check out my other post Blogging for Your Small Business: A Practical Guide for tips and practical suggestions after you finish here!

If you’re a blogger or small website owner and this has happened to you, I completely understand the frustration. This post isn’t just a rant, it’s a breakdown of what happened, what I did in response, and what you can try if you ever find yourself in the same boat.

Background

I'm a woodturner with my own website and a separate blog hosted on another platform. I previously worked in IT for five years, so I’m comfortable with computers, software, and server-side issues. I built my website using a drag-and-drop platform, but by managing it myself instead of farming it out to a web developer, I’ve learned a great deal about what goes on behind the scenes.

I decided to move my non woodworking related posts over to a separate platform so I could Blog about anything and everything without it affecting or diluting my main website away from woodturning. I worked hard getting the old content moved over and had started writing brand new posts about topics that interest me (and hopefully others).

What Happened – My Blog Was De-Indexed Overnight

I had published a variety of posts, some personal, some with 301 redirects from my main site, some affiliate-based content, all original and they were starting to gain a little traction. Then out of nowhere, Google pulled the rug out from under me.

Google Search Console showed “26 URLs discovered – not indexed” across the board. Even my 11 previously indexed pages disappeared. What the hell was going on?

Google Search Console screenshot showing 26 URLs discovered but 0 indexed, with a bar graph indicating crawl activity but no indexing.

I Checked Everything and Still Had No Answers

Like any blogger, I started troubleshooting:

Checked robots.txt and meta tags, nothing blocked.
Pages were mobile-friendly and loading fine.
Canonical links looked okay.
Sitemap & Feeds were live and submitted.

Still, no indexing. Why would I have been completely de-indexed when I had 11 Indexed posts? It made no sense whatsoever.

The Emotional Toll – Feeling Invisible

Let’s be honest: when you put in the hours writing content that’s real, helpful, and personal, being removed from Google feels like a punch in the gut.

It’s not just about traffic, it’s about feeling like your voice isn’t being heard or accepted. That your work, no matter how honest, is being ignored by the platform that’s supposed to help people find things.

What I Tried to Fix It

Here’s what I did and what you can do too if it happens to you:

I resubmitted affected URLs through GSC’s Inspect tool.
Re-shared posts across X, Facebook, and Instagram to drive discovery.
Updated a few posts and hit “republish” to give them a fresh timestamp.
Added stronger internal links between posts.

I signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools, I had been advised before by a website builder that also registering my site with Bing sends a strong message to Google so I did just that.

Bing also returned a warning saying the sitemap wasn’t found but that’s expected, since Blogger doesn’t use traditional sitemaps. Instead, you need to submit your blog’s post feed URL in place of a standard sitemap.xml file.

Did It Work? (Too Soon to Tell)

So far? It’s a mixed bag. Bing indexed most of the content quickly.

Google? Still radio silence. I'm now up to 30 URLs not indexed, since I've been adding new posts.

In the past, I’ve noticed that newer posts are sometimes indexed faster than republished ones, but there’s no clear pattern here. At the time of writing it has been more than half a week and GSC still shows no sign of indexing my posts.

I added new details to my posts and tweaked the content a little before asking GSC to index my pages again. I'm leading with the strongest candidates this time and hopefully the internal links to other posts will do the rest. Fingers crossed!

What I’ll Do Differently Going Forward

This whole fiasco was a wake-up call for me. Here’s what I plan to adjust:

Structure internal links better from Day 1.
Don’t publish too many affiliate posts in a short space of time.
Keep all my image formats light and clean.
Give new posts a few days to settle before manually requesting indexing.

At some point in the next week or so I will revisit each post and make changes to improve, maybe add an image here and there with new title and alt text which should make a difference.

Why Didn’t I Just Use WordPress?

Good question and honestly, I considered it. But I wanted something lightweight, low-maintenance, and quick to get started with. Blogger let me hit the ground running without worrying about hosting, plugins, or endless updates.

I know WordPress offers more control and flexibility, but sometimes simpler is better, especially for a personal blog where I just want to write and publish without getting too technical.

That said, if things don’t improve with indexing, I may have to rethink that choice…

A Quick Addition Before Posting

Over the weekend - before posting this, I added a new All Blog Posts page that should act as a crawlable sitemap for search engines. I also created new menu pages - About, Contact, and Support - each with cross-links to improve navigation. The goal is to make the blog feel more like a full website, while also offering more structured content (even for the scrapers!). Fingers crossed it helps!

Final Thoughts – You’re Not Alone

If this has happened to you, take a deep breath. You didn’t do anything wrong. Sometimes Google's system just... glitches. It’s maddening, but you’re not alone.

The best thing we can do is support each other, share what worked (and didn’t), and keep showing up. If your blog is honest and useful, it deserves to be found.

If you have a similar experience, add it to the comments and we can maybe help someone who is experiencing the same problem.

Thanks for Reading,

David

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