My blog more or less fell out of the Google Index in late August and I was suddenly unable to find anything in it via Google. (I set up Google Search Console long ago but don’t look at it very often — more on what I found later in the post.)

This blog isn’t very active but I don’t consider it defunct by any means. I have a decent archive that goes back to my very first post on August 2, 2005 when I announced I was going to Yahoo — 327 posts in all. I wrote about the very first internal Hack Day at Yahoo, posted about the absolutely epic Open Hack Day (with Beck!), and Open Hack Day in London (where the building we were in got struck by lightning!) I wrote about people who have left us during that period, ranging from James Brown to Buck Owens to not-famous people in my own life like Evelyn McNeill and my father. I wrote about leaving Yahoo! to join Etsy and I wrote about leaving Etsy. And then in the next chapter, I wrote about joining Reboot as a coach, teaching at Cornell Tech, and establishing my own independent coaching practice. A post that got linked to a lot related to coaching was this one about the magic of the red/yellow/green check-in. Finally, I embarked on deeper musical explorations in April 2019 when I started taking piano lessons and wrote about it at six months and then at a year (I’m still playing!) I even wrote about helping to get a Confederate monument moved in Louisburg, NC.

In a world that is being increasingly inundated with AI slop, I would hope there remains a place for personal, hand-cranked, semi-random topics written by an actual human. Googlebot, if you’re reading this, please take this post as an invitation (a plea?) to bring this blog back into the realm of the living.

So what is happening under the hood? I don’t consider myself an SEO expert but I’ve done enough work in that area to know the basics so I did a checkup of my blog in Google Search Console and it was mostly ok in a structural sense. Things were pretty normal on August 20 then suddenly a bunch of pages that were indexed fell out of the index (see Indexing graph below from Google Search Console) and that was followed by my search clicks cratering (see first graph). Here’s what I’ve already checked:

• Google is choosing not to index the pages, not failing to reach them. About 315 pages show up in Search Console as “Crawled – currently not indexed,” which Google attributes to “Google systems” and not to anything on the site. Google can see the pages fine. It has just decided it doesn’t want them.
• No technical blocking. robots.txt only blocks the WordPress admin and login pages. There are no stray noindex tags and the canonical URLs are correct. URL Inspection says crawling is allowed, fetching succeeds, and indexing is allowed.
• No penalties. Manual actions and security issues both say “No issues detected.”
• I requested reindexing. I used “Request Indexing” on the piano posts and a handful of others. Google dutifully came back and recrawled them (as recently as today, October 6) and they’re still “Crawled – currently not indexed.”
• Sitemap. I hadn’t manually submitted a sitemap but a valid sitemap was listed in robots.txt and Googlebot had been pulling it regularly. I manually submitted it for good measure.

The timing lines up almost to the day with the end of Google’s August 2026 spam update, which finished rolling out on August 21. I’m not alone: people have been reporting pages dropping into “Crawled – currently not indexed” all year, and Google says it sees nothing unusual. My best guess is that a 20-year-old personal blog with a lot of old, short posts got caught as a false positive. There’s no obvious appeal process for an algorithmic call like that (and I haven’t reached out to any well-connected friends to try to get special attention). Google started rolling out yet another spam update on September 24, so for now I wait and keep writing, which may be the only real remedy I haven’t already tried.

If you’ve seen this exact pattern — “Crawled – currently not indexed” across a whole site right after the August update — and actually gotten out of it, I’d love to hear what worked. Fingers crossed that this post helps.