Blogging: Indexing Woes
We could apologize for writing about blogging again, but let’s face it, no one apart from us is reading this. Today, we’ll be focusing on our indexing issues. Most of this post is about Google Search Console, one of the gatekeepers aspiring bloggers must overcome to show up in online search results (the others being Microsoft’s Bing and whatever algorithmic border separates relevant results from random stuff on DuckDuckGo).
BLOGGER CURSE?
Our experience with GSC in relation to the WordPress blogs was excellent: posts were swiftly indexed and turned up on online searches. Even the abject failure that was The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Cyber Edition got all its posts indexed while their original Blogger counterparts remained ignored. A couple of early successes with The Snarky Cats of Ulthar (TSCOU) gave us the illusion that a Blogger blog might be an advantage when it came to GSC - we were very, very wrong. The sitemaps are being read regularly and while there’s no need to resubmit them, we do, also regularly. After posting anything, we immediately go to GSC for URL inspection + testing, which always comes back as ‘URL can be indexed’, followed by a request for indexing. None of this is working. The only posts that have remained indexed throughout the many fluctuations are the Sleepless Society ones, and even 1 of them has already been unindexed. That these are the only posts that get us any constant search clicks is no surprise - what else would people find online from us? However, the search clicks have been reduced to 0 these past few weeks. At one point, we had as little as only 4 indexed posts. Currently, we have a whooping 7 indexed posts from TSCOU and 2 from this blog. Neither A Goat 4 Zazzie (AG4Z) nor The Weird Cats of Ulthar (formerly known as The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Weird Fiction) were ever deemed good enough to turn up anywhere on google searches, not even the very last page that no one ever gets to.
Bing was the opposite. After being baffled at its difficulty in reading the WordPress sitemaps, we were surprised to find out that it had been indexing our Blogger posts even without us submitting URLs. Sadly, there don’t seem to be any search clicks.
REDIRECT ERROR
GSC kindly lets bloggers know why their posts are being ignored and gives them the chance to correct whatever issues are preventing them from being indexed. Some make sense, like when we delete a post and it says it can’t be found, but the one that’s affecting most of the published posts, including every single new one across all blogs, is the unfathomable Redirect Error. The posts have nothing in common, so it’s impossible to tell why it’s happening: they were copy/pasted from a Rich Text document (always using the ‘paste as plain text’ option); they were written directly on Blogger from the android app, on the browser on a tablet, on the browser on a laptop; they have short titles, long titles, medium-length titles; they have links, they have no links; they have images, they have no images; they have videos, they have no videos. There’s nothing that we can point to and say Oh, that’s why! It’s just frustrating. When we first noticed it and found out that it could mean that the URL was too long, we made 2 new posts with reviews for Dororo and The Offering - it didn’t work and GSC ended up with 2 submitted URLs for similar posts that likely made things even more confusing. We’ve gone through several rounds of ‘Validate Fix’ and while it worked for some posts (this means they were considered error-free, not that they were indexed), the vast majority still have issues, including all from AG4Z and TWCOU. Ironically, some of the errors include posts not being crawled and indexed… Gee, wonder whose fault that is, Google Search Console?
Bing also tells you if there are problems, and it was because of it that we had to change our cool TWCOU sidebar. Turns out that even though they weren’t part of the posts, Bing took the banners for each category into account when inspecting them and the lack of Alt Text, which isn’t even possible, was seen as a negative.
WORTHY CONTENT
We’ve already discussed the technical issues, but even before that GSC just wasn’t interested in our posts. The majority of posts that have been indexed are traditional, albeit snarky, reviews. This is a problem because there’s way too much competition in that area. Both AG4Z and TWCOU have plenty of reviews, but maybe AG4Z’s focus on religious-themed horror and apocalyptic movies isn’t appealing enough? As for TWCOU, there are Weird Fiction reviews out there, and maybe GSC doesn’t think it needs more? Occasionally a post on our digital comic book series, An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying, was also chosen, but we’ve never understood why each post made it, and it didn’t last. Right now, the post about yet unpublished prequel Antigone Zombie Revenge and the one about the evolution of the covers are the only ones indexed from this blog. Basically something that mentions a well-known character and pretty pictures. While they’re both about our work, they’re not the most original of the bunch, so it appears GSC doesn’t like taking risks. At one point we wondered if there was a conspiracy to suppress negative takes on Bluesky as 4 posts about the social media platform were systematically refused, but it was shortly after that we noticed the Redirect Error. Some of the blogging posts predate that, though, and GSC didn’t want them either; clearly our online experiences aren’t worthy of being shared with the general public. Considering all the crap we find on our online searches, that feels a little insulting.
DUCKDUCKGO
We hadn’t given DuckDuckGo much thought as unlike GSC and Bing, you can’t submit blogs and websites to it, but, in a fit of despair, we decided to check to see if any of our posts turned up there - they did, and a few in the very first page. These posts included some of those GSC just couldn’t index due to the Redirect Error. So, GSC can’t index them but Bing, which is using the same sitemaps, can and they also turn up on DuckDuckGo? How? This is just crazy. Unfortunately, we noticed that some posts that fit our search didn’t turn up, which would’ve been fine (okay, not really) if the results didn’t include a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with the search terms we used. Shouldn’t our posts have turned up before DuckDuckGo started hallucinating? But hey, at least we got to see our blogs turn up online, where people can find them.
NOW WHAT?
Bing may be more generous when indexing stuff, but no one seems to care. As for GSC, we honestly don’t know what it wants. Are we being too creative? Not creative enough? After removing all those posts from TSCOU, it ended up more generic. It is more focused thematically, but it doesn’t have the weird energy of AG4Z, the more personal feel of this blog, or the more limited scope of TWCOU. So, GSC prefers more of the same and doesn’t like niches? But what if people are looking for something else? Like, say, a 3469 word review/comparison of Peter Thiel’s speeches from 2023 and 2022 at Stanford and the Oxford Union? Or a conspiracy theory about the nefarious true purpose of Bluesky (relax, it’s a joke)? Well, clearly they’ll just have to go without because GSC doesn’t care. We’ve even abandoned all attempts at humorous titles and opted for just using the name of whatever we’re reviewing and always add a description to the posts with all the appropriate keywords to keep it as clear as possible for GSC. The introduction of AI in blogging is another obstacle. We’d like to believe that Google will be better at filtering out (non Google) AI content than Wikipedia copy/pasting, but we seriously doubt it. This means even more competition. And since we hid the comments section, no well-meaning spammer bots will be able to offer their assistance. Sorry, spammer bots.
