I first noticed an issue with this a week or so ago. I Googled “Cleveland Public Library”, and although the results contained sub-sites for various branches of the library, none of them pointed to https://cpl.org/ , the library’s main page.
Today, I searched again, and now almost all of the hits from that domain are removed, with the sole survivor being a French translation of the main page.
There are still plenty of hits about the library, and most of those hits themselves have a link to https://cpl.org/ somewhere on them. But it’s not in the Google results. What’s happening? Did some librarian really piss off Google? Is it renamed to Library America? Did someone at the library specifically request that it be de-listed?
Odd, then. The first hits I get are the library’s Facebook account, then the Wikipedia page, then their X account, then the French version of the main page, then something called the “Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery”, which is on a different site, then a site called “This is Cleveland”, then a site hosted by the City of Cleveland listing libraries in the city, then one from University Circle, Inc. The second page has one hit from the cpl.org domain, about careers at the library. The third, fourth, and fifth pages have nothing from that domain.
Searching “Cleveland Ohio Public Library” brings up the library website as the first link. But if I put in “Cleveland Public Library”, the one in Cleveland, Tennessee is the first link, which is dumb.
IMHO this is actually a really interesting situation. Usually sites disappear from Google due to some misconfiguration on their side, some sort of website hijacking and red-flagging on the Safe Browsing List, or other similar technical errors.
As far as I can tell, none of the usual suspects seem to apply to cpl.org (and it DOES show up on Google under other search queries, just not “Cleveland Public Library”, at least not from my computer & location). It works fine on other search engines too.
My best guess is it’s a Google bug that will resolve itself in a day or two, or maybe somebody on the library side accidentally removed their main website from Google Search Console… which would be bad, of course.
But it’s interesting. This doesn’t usually happen to bigger, reputable sites.
Shrug. Maybe it’s just one more thing Gemini is taking over and getting sloppy at.
Regionalization is at least preventing that for me: I’m in the Cleveland area, and so all of the hits I’m getting are for Cleveland, OH (though some are for other local libraries, like the library at Cleveland State University).
But still, unless you’re in Tennessee, you wouldn’t think that Cleveland, Tennessee should be high on anyone’s list, since the one in Ohio is by far the largest Cleveland.
And when I Google “Cleveland Ohio Public Library”, I get about the same hits as without the “Ohio”: All things that make sense as hits, just not the first hit.
Huh. I’ve seen this happen with small websites, usually for stupid reasons that can be fixed if the site owner learns if the problem. But that’s really weird.
Fwiw, kagi gave me their main website as the first link. And I’m pretty sure kagi relies on Google data. So either Google has fixed the issue, it is a bizarre AI failure.
I googled something this morning and 100% of the hits were for Facebook and Instagram, which I found deeply suspicious. It was a word I didn’t know in a language I’m studying, but most of the pages pulled were English-language pages discussing it.
What you see depends on your settings. When I select Web [results] I get what you see: no link to the English-language main page. When I select All [results] CPL is the first result, complete with a link to the main page, but it’s listed under “Locations”. That’s because Locations results are from a database tied to Google Maps which is separate from the usual web results.
I don’t see anything on cpl.org/robots.txt or in the source code of cpl.org that would explain this behavior. It’s possible somebody there unintentionally disallowed crawling or indexing by Googlebot. If so they may have already reversed the change but there hasn’t been enough time for Googlebot to crawl it again. Usually being disallowed from crawling a site means it still shows up in the search results but without the snippet (summary), provided there are other web pages Googlebot can crawl that link to it. Failure to show up at all in the search results usually means it can’t be indexed for some reason. I think Googlebot was disallowed from crawling the French-language page by robots.txt, but it was still indexed, which is why it shows up in the results without a snippet.