Moving away from Blogger
After several years of posting to my blogs on the Blogger.com platform, I’ve decided to move to a different platform.
The main motivation for the move has been to have the content be indexable by Google, as that was a serious limitation on Blogger.
How did Blogger not work with Google?
There were a combination of changes that ultimately resulted in my Blogger-hosted sites not being indexable by Google.
- Google changed its approach to indexing of web pages to apply a “mobile first” philosophy, whereby the content that would show up if you used a mobile device – such as a phone – would be the content that it considers for inclusion in Google’s search engine.
- The Blogger platform was set up to support presenting a separate view for mobile devices, allowing for different layouts and style sheets to give an optimised view. The approach that was applied to achieve this involves redirecting the mobile clients to a slightly different URL, with a parameter appended on the end so that the Blogger server would present the appropriate mobile-specific HTML and CSS.
- Within the blog content there is an HTML tag that identifies the canonical URL. The canonical URL can signal to search engines that if there is more than one page with the same content, then the canonical one should be regarded as authoritative.
- When Google’s mobile crawler hits a blog post on the Blogger platform it ends up being redirected to a different URL. The different URL contains the same content as the original one but with different styling. When the mobile crawler reads through the HTML of the page it extracts out the canonical URL information and compares it with the URL that it is currently using. Since the canonical URL does not match with the redirected URL, the crawlers stops processing the page and discards it.
- Because the mobile crawler is generally the only Google crawler that actively indexes content, we end up with no pages being included in Google’s index. That means that anyone searching on Google will not see any search results from the Blogger hosted site.
The irony here is that the Google company actually owns the Blogger platform.
A cynical person might suggest that it is not in Googles interests to keep Blogger going, so having people move away is fine.
Linking back
Although they may no longer show on Google, my earlier blogs can be found at: