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Comment by netruk44 | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, I’ve noticed on the google search console that they aren’t crawling or indexing my personal blog at all, basically.

I have to manually request indexing in order for my months old blog posts to show up on Google. I went from 1 appearance in search results every few days to 15 per day just by manually requesting indexing on my recent blog posts.

But what I find confusing is that even when I do this, Google won’t follow any links it finds when it eventually gets around to crawling my posts. I submit my site map and it won’t index anything new. I have to manually ask Google to index every new blog post I make.

It seems like small blogs like mine just aren’t what Google is interested in finding and presenting to users.

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New posts on my blog have been getting steady inflows from Bing for over a month now, but zero from Google. I never thought the day would come when Google's search quality would be worse than Bing's. Google's search quality for the long tail seems to have declined very much.

Agreed. Same here.

This is strange. Going by log files, my low-post-frequency, low-readership personal blog gets regular googlebot visits. I'd say 95+% of the log is crawlers with Google coming the most often. I don't use any of their analytics or advertising services. When I last posted, I checked the log and saw sitemap entries within a minute and indexing a short while later.

I agree with the premise that Google's search has gotten worse but that seems consistent across engines. I use Duck Duck Go as my default but wind up having to bangtag to other engines more frequently. Maybe clustering search tools which burbled up in the mid-2000s will come back and get more users this time.

Maybe with so much linking being reliant upon social media these days it is becoming increasingly difficult to trust new sources? I notice even regular sites that do link out are increasingly using nofollow as a default.

Uploading a sitemap might help?

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Related, I found that Googlebot only fetches sitemap.xml.gz, while other bots only try to fetch sitemap.xml. That's probably some configuration quirk on my part.

They mentioned they submitted a sitemap.

They do the same thing with substack and medium. Content like this doesn't really show unless you specifically search for it. While I understand where this policy is coming from, i.e., to distinguish proper outlets from blogspam. But it feels that in 2024, a lot of serious longform content has moved from traditional media to sites like the ones aforementioned.

Backlinks probably matter. Like most of my blog is findable on Google, despite being pretty far away from being a "proper outlet".

In general it's hard to for a search engine to understand the context of a website if there are few or no organic links to it. That hasn't really changed the last 30 years.

Because Google judges your blog to be low quality. Sorry to break that news to you. It probably isn't an accurate judgement.

Nah, this happens for all new sites these days.

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