The Real Blogger Status

Your blog depends upon traffic for its success - and similar to custom domain migration, will suffer a period of lower search related traffic, while being upgraded to HTTPS. Larger blogs get better search reputation, all other details being equal. While your blog is being reindexed, after you enable "HTTPS Redirect", you will have a blog with two different base URLs - and both URLs will reference two smaller blogs, and have lower search reputation. All posts in your blog will not be reindexed under an HTTPS URL, immediately. Some posts will remain indexed under the HTTP URL, as others are re indexed under the HTTPS URL, one by one. While being reindexed, your blog will look like two smaller blogs - and both URLs will suffer from lowered search reputation.

Besides optimizing post content , to make the blog easier to read and encourage readers to remain. you have a similar task in optimizing the blog structure. The posts content is what people read, when they are in the blog. The blog structure is what you similarly need to optimize, to get people into the blog.

Along with consistently using Jump Break, properly sizing and wording of important post sections can make the blog pages neater, and easier to read. You see my opening paragraph, above. Sizing and wording of important post sections, such as the opening paragraph, helps make the main page layout more consistent - and gives a slightly more professional look to the blog. And, a cleaner and more consistent page layout, to complement a carefully structured blog , encourages readers to read more of the blog.

Blog owners use many techniques for getting new readers - and for keeping existing readers happy. Some blog owners use techniques which work inconsistently, because they are not designed to work the way they are being used. Some blog owners becomes concerned when their blogs, listed in blogrolls on other peoples blogs, don't seem to be updated as regularly as they would expect. Blogrolls are good tools for getting new readers, in a casual manner. They may not be as good, for predictable, scheduled visitor activity.

Occasionally, Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we see concern about another search efficiency report. I'm getting a report mentioning Multiple meta descriptions found for the page What do I do? Similar to the long known panic about blocked label search indexing, this is more confusion about label searches . If you spend time adding search description meta tags , to new and previously published pages and posts in a blog, eventually you will have some posts with search descriptions, and with a common label. A label search page, for a label containing multiple posts each of which have a search description, is going to have multiple search descriptions.

Some blog owners want to have the titles of the posts easier to spot, in search hit lists. The solution, to them, is to have the post titles appear before the blog titles, in the template header. If you want your blog to have the post title in front of the blog title, this is a simple enough change. It's best to make this change only affect display of individual pages (when indexed), and posts . Other search hit list entries, such as archive, label, and main page displays, should show the default blog page title - and not confuse the potential readers with irrelevant detail, in the search hit list entries.

Some blog owners want to emphasise the nature of the blog content, to the search engines. Given a properly developed blog , you can add meta tags, on a per blog, per page, and per post basis. The tags can indicate, to your prospective readers, what the blog - and each page and post - is about.

We continue to see evidence of frustration about getting a blog indexed, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . I can find the blog using the URL - but my visitor log shows nobody is reading the blog! and My blog was #1 for my title, in Google, 3 months ago! Last month, it dropped out of sight!! Why does Google let people hack their results??? People who report these problems do not understand that getting traffic to the blog involves more than simply getting the blog indexed , using the Author, Title, or URL of the blog.

A lot of blog owners are confused about how their blogs get indexed by the search engines. Why do many SERP hits lead to my main page, where there is no content? is a normal question. Many blog owners think that the search engines , as they index a blog, are executing one big magic trick.

Among the many odd circumstances connected with the controversial Auto Pagination feature that was introduced a month ago , we see reports by a few bloggers of broken inlinks, caused by segmentation of archive and main pages. Most reports specifically mention broken SERP entries, which link to content that's now found in an archive or main page segment that's reached by one or more clicks of "Older Posts". The new and currently un indexed segments have URLs which differ from the SERP entries. This effect is similar to a problem which I wrote about some time ago, which affect SERPs linking to main page content . Both the archive pages and the main page in a blog are more likely to be indexed by the search engines, because there is more content on these pages, and some content has already been indexed. Some posts, lacking inlinks completely, and depending upon the publishing frequency, may never be indexed except as archive or main page content.

Many blog owners are unclear about how their blogs are indexed by the search engines. We occasionally see the confused query Visitors are coming in to my blog through the Google search engine. They don't stay though, the reason being that Google doesn't take them to the post they found - and which is obviously the one relevant to their search - but to the home page of the blog. Why does this happen? The search engines are like your readers - with your posts published on the main page, they will index the post content, from the main page.