How Do You Fix Something When You're Already Dead to Google?

Curiosity can be a real bitch at times.

After I’d made this post about how Shintar had discovered that Parallel Context wasn’t showing up in Google’s search results, Bhagpuss’s comment led me to investigating what the Google Console was all about. For a guy who likes to pride himself about being on the internet before the first browser was invented, the fact I never knew the Google Console or its Bing equivalent existed was a blow to my ego. Still, I swallowed my pride and poked around.

Once I started looking over the Google and Bing consoles, that was it. Like any kid who read his share of Encyclopedia Brown books (and Sherlock Holmes stories) I love a good mystery, and on the consoles I found mysteries in spades.

For starters, why was the Google Console telling me that I had a security alert on my blog?

I knew I hadn’t deliberately done anything stupid such as linking to a picture from a sketchy website –I’d gotten tired of picture links vanishing underneath me so I simply made local copies with citations—so it had to be a link to a website that had gone bad. Or worse, something about Blogger that had raised the ire of Google.* The Google Console was completely unhelpful as to which post or link was the offender, so I was left to my own devices to try to puzzle through this.

The best course of action was to start with the links on the main page, because those are found on every blog page. If that didn’t work, then I was going to have to slog through every single post to find the culprit. I began with the blogs with the longest period of inactivity and worked my way back toward the newest, and I eventually found the culprit: it was Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi’s SWTOR blog. She’d had periods of inactivity followed by a few clusters of posts, but the last post on her blog had raised my eyebrows because it didn’t have Njessi’s authorial voice. I’d even fired off an email to her asking if her blog had been hacked, but I never got a response. This time when I clicked on the link, however, her blog simply exploded with all sorts of spam pop-ups and stuff completely unrelated to an MMO blog (such as online gambling). I cried a little inside, removed the link to Hawtpants of the Old Republic, and submitted the blog for security review to Google Console.

It took a few days, which surprised me given how quickly Google tends to yank people's access to things, but I got this emailed response:

This was on September 3, 2025, for the curious.

Okay, so I then submitted the site for indexing, and several days later I got this response:

This was on September 14, 2025.

WTF, Google. I tried hunting down what they meant by that, and at that moment I learned something important: Google's help pages aren't worth crap. There was very little in the way of anything resembling constructive assistance, probably because Google, like Microsoft, wants you to pay for the privilege of fixing your website. Eventually I figured out that there was another problem on the blog, likely a link that is going to a different location than what the link expects.

Well, this is going to suck trying to figure out which link is the problem. Just because the link doesn't go to where you expect --yet is NOT a link to a security risk-- shouldn't be a reason to not index the blog. My disgust with Google's lack of assistance aside, I started poking around once more. 

"URL is not on Google". No shit, Sherlock.
From September 20, 2025

Turns out it was this little widget that was the problem:

Despite the description, the RSS feed has long since gone away, one of those few times that Blogger has actually been proactive in removing something that was being sunset. That left Atom and links to Yahoo and Netvibes (or something like that). Atom worked, although it wasn't in "normal" HTML format, but Yahoo and Netvibes went to each website's 404 address.

Surely, this couldn't be the root cause, could it? Could it? I tested the live URL, and...

It's the same result as I got a few days ago.

Okay, we're getting somewhere. So I resubmitted the page for indexing and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I finally got a result:

Really? I mean, REALLY?
From September 21, 2025.

Basically they didn't index the page because the page hasn't been indexed. If that wasn't a truly abominable case of circular reasoning, I don't know what is.

So... I pretty much have gone as far as I can with indexing, because Google will eventually fix the "Crawled - currently not indexed" issue when it gets around to it.

At least on the bright side I cleared up a security issue and a couple of bad links, but nothing resembling a positive result. Parallel Context is still dead to Google.

*Oh, the irony of THAT one. If Google were complaining about its own Blogger service, someone should get these two to talk together. Well, maybe not, now that I think about it; Google might decide the easier course of action would be to kill off Blogger instead.