I am not 100% sure what happened, but during 2024 I had the need to search my blog site for a problem I was getting. I knew I had solved and documented it on the site previously, after all, this the principle reason for writing up these posts i.e. share knowledge and maintain a library of information across employers/contracts.
However, when searching I noticed that the page I was expecting simply wasn't being returned.
I tried a few other browsers and had similar results (nothing). DuckDuckGo however, worked! At this point the penny dropped that somehow it was Google that was dropping my site and the other browsers were configured to use google as their search provider.
To this day I don't 100% know what was causing this issue, but the steps I worked through were.
1. Set the blogger site to not allow crawlers.
2. Generate a sitemap with a free 3rd party tool and upload to the root.
3. Use google console to encourage reindexing. This reduce the number of non indexed pages from over 200 to 44. Note the 44 are mainly duplicates of the page within the google/blogger sphere so fortunately this means the content is still fully available.
4. Be patient and respond to the many google emails, keep retrying indexing options after each YouTube video of influencer blog post and their recommendations that I read.
For now, this seems to be solved.
This issue may have been going on for weeks, months or even years. I have no idea. Hopefully, all now back online and searchable.
If you don't already, please bookmark if you find this blog of value so that you can continue to watch as new posts get up and running.
I had held back on some posts for early 2025 whilst I was trying to resolve the issues.
Lee.
