Back to WordPress.com

Last time we wrote about our blogging woes, we focused on indexing and Google Search Console’s (GSC) apparent disdain for Google’s own blogging platform. Well, things got even funnier after we googled some more about that annoying redirect error that has been preventing all our posts from being indexed. By ‘funny’, of course, we don’t mean something causing a hearty laugh, but rather the kind of mad shriek of despair that signals a breaking point. This lead us to do the unthinkable - return to WordPress.

THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

The first time we googled about GSC and the redirect error, we didn’t find anything useful, but this time, we found a possible explanation. That redirect error we couldn’t understand but that GSC assured us was caused by the blogs themselves? Turns out that the problem is the way GSC crawls pages, which makes it see the desktop version of the URL as separate from the mobile version. The latter is pretty much the same, except for the m=1 in the end, but it appears that’s enough to confuse GSC. There’s nothing we can do, just wait. And if it’s something else, we still don’t get it. Recently, we saw that 4 pages from The Weird Cats of Ulthar (TWCOU) had been indexed. Victory? Not really. Not only does GSC seem to not even see most of the pages it detected on the sitemap, but also those 4 pages are in reality only 2 posts; GSC just counted the desktop URL and mobile URL as 2 different URLs. So, on one hand, it’s not counting them as duplicates and slapping them with a redirect error, which is good; on the other hand, it’s still ignoring most of the posts. Shockingly, one of the indexed posts (Everil Worrell VS August Derleth) turned up on the first page of a search, above the Amazon link, with the query ‘Everil Worrell  August Derleth’. When we googled just ‘Everil Worrell’ or ‘Everil Worrell reviews’ it wasn’t even on the third page, though. Still, we’re happy to see one of our reviews turn up, even if it feels too little, too late. Things are looking even worse with the other blogs: The Snarky Cats of Ulthar (TSCOU) was down to 4 indexed posts when we started writing this and a couple of days later it has only 1; A Goat 4 Zazzie (AG4Z) currently has 3, with one of them being the homepage; and The Indie Cats of Ulthar (TICOU) had 4 indexed posts when we started writing this and now has a big, round 0. Needless to say, all the unindexed posts got hit with the redirect error, at least the ones GSC acknowledges. It’s super weird seeing the sitemap show the right number of existing pages, and then see GSC ignoring sometimes more than half of them when crawling it. As for the AIFAMS Wiki, the homepage/menu got hit with the dreaded redirect error.

The indexed posts from TWCOU could very well have all been unindexed again by the time we publish this post, and we still don’t get why those posts from TICOU (which GSC already ditched) were picked as opposed to the ones about our online personal experiences. We may not be experts, but our posts on Bluesky are more informative than some of the crap that did get indexed. The AIFAMS Wiki was more of an addition to the TICOU blog, but it wouldn’t hurt if GSC decided to index it. By the way, in our online search, we found blog posts and YouTube videos purporting to help you solve redirect errors. The last result on the first page was particularly enlightening.

It’s just so easy! We looked to see if there were any links to a more informative post or video, but there weren’t. Great quality control, GSC…

RETURN TO WORDPRESS

In a fit of despair, we started to wonder if maybe things would be easier if these were WordPress blogs, and even thought to make an experiment by copying one of the smaller blogs back there. After googling some more, we found people with WordPress blogs complaining about the redirect error, but since staying on Blogger wasn’t helping, we decided we might as well give it a try. Because the smaller blogs are being indexed, even if very slowly and randomly, we opted to copy the TSCOU blog. Naturally, we used a different email address and username when creating our new WordPress.com account. We did keep the same name and uploaded the same profile pic, but there was no warning and we managed to save the changes to our profile. Before that, we had had trouble activating the chosen blog theme and weren’t able to write a post. We thought it was just a glitch in the dashboard - we were wrong. Shortly after, we received a warning that the blog we had created only minutes ago and which had no posts or pages, had been suspended because of WordPress.com’s Terms of Service. We sent the email contesting the suspension and it was lifted. For some reason our empty blog had been marked as spam. Sigh, not a very good start WordPress…

THESNARKYCATSOFULTHAR.WORDPRESS.COM

This time, we decided to keep things simpler and gave up on having an image below the title. Our homepage is set to latest posts and we managed to overcome the whole sidebar is sent to the bottom on smaller screens by treating it like the footer. This meant limiting the number of widgets to the bare minimum. It actually worked better than using the footers because the background remains black instead of turning white. Thanks to the option ‘custom links’ we managed to put all the Categories on the Navigation Menu. We even made dropdown menus! Since everything was labelled, we weren’t sure if we should transfer posts outside the Horror and SFF genre, but decided to put them under Miscellaneous. So, yes, the Sleepless Society: The Series reviews also made it. The Eurovision ones, on the other hand, didn’t. As we mentioned on the previous post about blog stats, this time we’re connected to the larger WordPress.com community, which has already resulted in some views and likes.

Homepage of TSCOU at WordPress.com

We even made dropdown menus!

Transferring the posts made us more aware of the blog’s content. Obviously we knew what was on it; after all, we wrote all the posts. However, a lot of them were removed and sent to the spin-offs, which helped us ‘see’ each group of posts better as we organized them. We hadn’t had the chance to do that with TSCOU, and our mental image was still of the original, more cluttered blog. Having the chance to re-post the remaining posts made things clearer. We were also surprised at how mean some of the earlier ones were. Oh, and let’s not forget the typos we found on posts that had been out there for nearly 2 years… We’re not sure how that happened. Perhaps the typo fairy paid our blog a visit? Pretty embarrassing. We corrected them, of course. Other changes included removing all the ‘recently watched’, references to posts that hadn’t been re-posted yet, and stuff that we had become aware of in the meantime, like Parasyte: The Grey not having a second season. We almost went crazy copying all the posts and WordPress.com will probably be very disappointed when they realize that we won’t be posting dozens of posts per day.

SUCCESS?

Last time we checked, GSC had already indexed 17 posts from the new blog, with no redirect error in sight. No search clicks yet, though. We also haven’t checked to see how our posts are ranking in search results. Shockingly, Bing was not only able to process the sitemap (unlike during our previous WordPress.com adventure), but we've also already had clicks from them! It's a Christmas miracle! Since we don’t know if we’re going to be forced to go back to Blogger, we haven’t deleted the original blog - we just hid it from search engines and made it private. Depending on what happens with GSC and WordPress.com, we may have to transfer The Indie Cats of Ulthar, too, but for now, we’re going to wait and see.