--- title: "I've Been Deindexed by Google!" slug: ive-been-deindexed-by-google url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/ive-been-deindexed-by-google canonical_url: https://kennyqin.com/deindexed-by-google/ content_type: blog_post language: en published_at: 2026-10-07T11:15:00.000Z updated_at: 2026-10-08T08:08:12.847Z authored_by: human publisher: "Citron" publisher_url: https://kennyqin.com/ topics: ["SEO", "Web", "AI Scraping"] license: all-rights-reserved word_count: 225 reading_minutes: 1 citation: "Citron. \"I've Been Deindexed by Google!.\" 7 Oct 2026. https://kennyqin.com/deindexed-by-google/ (all-rights-reserved)" --- # I've Been Deindexed by Google! > A short post on getting a personal blog removed from Google search to resist AI scraping: a blanket robots.txt disallow did nothing, and the fix was ironically to allow Googlebot back in so it could see a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag, repeated for other bots until the site dropped out of the index. I don't remember exactly when but, earlier in the year, I decided I didn't want this website to be indexed by search engines anymore. A lot of it has to do with AI and the relentless scraping that plagues the internet now. I know that as long as my blog is accessible by the public internet, there are no real measures I can put in to stop it but at least some of it will be respected. I started out by setting a blanket disallow in the robots.txt. ``` User-agent: * Disallow: / ``` When I realised that didn't do anything after a few weeks of waiting and checking, I set the `robots` meta tag. ``` ``` I thought that would do the trick. What I didn't realise is that you have to actually, ironically, **allow** the bot that will do the deindexing to visit your website so that it can see the meta tag that tells it to not index your page anymore. ``` User-agent: Googlebot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: / ``` I also did this with several other common bots and removed them from the robots.txt whenever I found that my website had been deindexed. It's been at least 3 months since I did my last change to have Google deindex me and, after checking today, I'm happy to announce that this website is free from Google! 🥳