Bloggers: A pox on Googlebot

Technical stuff

For a while now, GoogleBot, via the Google Search Console, has been crawling and indexing sites "mobile first": that is, they crawl a web page as if they were a smartphone user. Only much later, if at all, do they come back and carry out a "desktop" crawl.

The issue for users of Blogger / Blogspot is that these sites detect the simulated mobile device and redirect GoogleBot, adding "?m=1" onto the end of the URL (web address).

So the page doesn't get indexed yet, because of the temporary error caused by the redirect. Only later does GoogleBot check the canonical address (which does not contain "?m=1"), sort itself out, and actually index the page.

All this adds to the "crawl budget", too, so fewer pages get indexed, and at a slower rate. Meanwhile – meaning for months, and months, and months – blog posts do not show up in Google search results, and visitor numbers plummet even further. I'm old enough to remember the early days of the Internet when Mom and Pop sites would show up in the first page of search results, but those days are sadly long gone.

Meanwhile, Bing and DuckDuckGo already have the latest blog posts indexed.

Be patient, they advise. Patience, my ass!

Please help!

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~ Esowteric at Bluesky.

Image

Image: Googleplex HQ (cropped) [Logo blurred out] / The Pancake of Heaven! / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.