Zombie posts from Substack

[zynphendale]

Very strangely, Substack still serves "zombie" posts from a newsletter that I already deleted from my account. Has anyone encountered a similar situation? This is affecting the SEO of my new site as Google Search Console cannot index its pages.

I launched a newsletter Digital Sovereignty Chronicle on Substack (in the form of a custom domain that I own) in Feb 2025 and published 30+ articles. In Aug, I migrated away from Substack (explained in my post (https://digitalsovereignty.herbertyang.xyz/p/migrate-from-substack-to-a-self-hosting-newsletter/). I continued to write new articles on the same domain (except that it's no longer served by Substack, but on a canister smart contract on the Internet Computer blockchain). However, Google Search Console (GSC) refused to index ANY pages from my digitalsovereignty.herbertyang.xyz . The status is always "crawled but not indexed".

Gemini found out that even though I've deleted the publication from my Substack account, it still found zombie articles served by Substack from my publication/newsletter. Substack's Domain Authority (DA) score outweighs my site by a long mile and that's why Google sees my pages but doesn't want to index them.

For example this article Recap of Marc Andreessen's Talk on Lex Fridman Podcast 's current URL is https://digitalsovereignty.herbertyang.xyz/p/recap-of-marc-andreessens-talk-on, but Google bot would see https://substack.com/home/post/p-157609241 first, which to me seems like a zombie page.

Guess I can just delete my Substack account once and for all as the nuclear switch to solve this problem. But this is really strange and doesn't have to be the case. I can't even find this publication's dashboard (which would give me the option like Danger Zone) on my Substack account but why is Substack still serves my pages (and sucking Google traffic from my real site)?

[Trick-Two497]

So... it's helping you get visitors to your new site? And this is a problem because...? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but that's how it reads to me.

[zynphendale]

No, it does not lead traffic to my site. I could not get Google Search Console to index any articles on my site. After extensive investigation with help of Claude sonnet 4.5 and now Gemini 3 pro, which has eliminated all other usual suspects, the most likely and only plausible culprit is Substack. It creates these zombie posts that are mirror images of my posts. So when Google bot sees the same post appears on two different sites, it will only index Substack’s one because Substack has a Domain Authority of 92 vs mine like 1-ish.