The Web Log

Discovered - currently not indexed If you have a lot of pages in your Google Search Console that are excluded, you might find that a lot of them are Discovered - currently not indexed . And if you drill down by clicking on it, you will find that Google did not even crawl these pages as their last crawled date is all N/A : The explanation given by Google is that google bot may have encountered problem trying to crawl the page. I find that highly unlikely, though, as my site has barely any traffic, and it's hosted on Blogger - Google's own service. A more likely explanation is that, for whatever reason, Google deemed these pages are unimportant, and put them very low in the crawl queue, and since Google bot is quite busy, it never got around to crawl these pages. How does Google determine which pages are important since it never even crawled them? I have no idea. Maybe it just looked at the title, or maybe it did a quick word count. Man...

Many people, myself included, would assume that Blogger, being a Google product, would have innate integration with the Google search engine, and therefore, any post that you write, would just automagically appear in google search results. But as a famous man once said: In this post, I'll list the things that prevented Google from indexing my posts, and how to rectify them. Also, according to this Wikipedia page , Google has over 90% market share. So, we will just be focusing on Google. But the same solutions should apply to other search engine as well. Note that you'll need to have Google Search Console set up already to investigate and fix Google Search problems. Failure of Discovering Pages - Sitemap Problem - Failure Discovering Pages The first problem I encountered was that Google didn't know how to navigate my blog, and therefore it only discovered 7 pages. I was really surprised that Google didn't even know to how discover pages from its own...

It's pretty abhorrent how Blogger lacks even the most basic functionalities such as navigating between the next and previous posts. For a platform often touted for being suitable for beginners, I'd say you'd have to be an experienced web developer to be able to use it. Even then, you can't just use it out of the box. You'd have to spend many hours adding code to make it work. Fear not though, in my Blogger tutorials, I'll show you how you can add custom functionalities to Blogger. In this post in particular, I'll show you how you can add Next & Previous post navigation to Blogger. There are many tutorials readily available on the Internet with different implementations. So you might want to shop around a little. I will just show the implementation I have used on this blog. Note you'll be adding / customizing code, so you need some basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge. Overview You'll mainly be installing 3 parts: Blogger t...

It's not that Blogger doesn't have the functionality of managing labels or they don't have the capability to provide such a functionality. It's just that Google, for some reason, really don't want you to find it. That being said, there ARE ways you can manage labels. And in this post, I'll show you where to find it and how to use it. Suppose you have some labels, what you might want to do is Batch change posts from one label to another Delete a label Rename a label We will go over these use cases one by one. Change the Label of Posts Single Post If you just want to change the labels of a single post, that's easy. Just edit the post, and in the Post settings section, change the labels. Multiple Posts But if you want to change multiple posts, it's not so straight forward, but still reasonable. In the Posts menu of Blogger, select the posts that you want to change from old label to a new label. Then click the label button next to...

If you want to start a blog, the general advice is to own your own website because hosted services such as Blogger is subject to the hosting company's rules and regulations. And you want to be very careful about what you post because the hosting company can wipe out all your hard work if they don't like what you post. (Kinda like media and Internet censorship in certain countries.) However, Blogger does come with its conveniences, plus it's free. All we need to do is just be aware of it's content policies. In this post, I'll go over the content policy of Blogger from the time of writing and give you a summary, so you don't have to read the whole thing yourself. But if you are interested, you can find the most up-to-date and detailed policy here . Adult Content You need to mark your blog as "Adult" in your Blogger settings if you want to include adult content. However, there are a lot of restrictions on what kind of adult content is allowed. A...

If your blog is primarily text based with multiple headings, a table of contents is essential. It allows readers to have an idea of what to expect and also the ability to jump to the section that they are interested in rather than scroll through the whole thing searching for it. Ideally, this table of contents should be automatically generated as creating them manually can be quite repetitive. There are pros and cons of generating it on the client side. The benefit is that users only have to download the script once and generate table of contents for all pages rather than having to download a different table of contents for each page. In this post, I will show you how to add a third party javascript table of contents (ToC) auto generation library to Blogger. Note that you might have to customize the code a little bit, so you'll need to have the basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Tocbot Tocbot  is a handy library that can generate table of contents ba...

At the time of writing, there is no W3C standard support for formatting and highlighting code in browsers. And since rendering is done on the client side, formatting and highlighting typically would require third party scripts to be run in the browser. This kind of script is unlikely to come with Blogger by default or with any of the themes as formatting and highlighting is a pretty daunting task as different programming languages would require different rules and thus is better maintained in a specialized library. In this post, I will walk you through the steps I took to add a third party code formatting and highlighting library to Blogger and enabling me to have formatted and highlighted code snippets in my blogger posts. Highlight.js Highlight.js  is a syntax highlighting library using javscript and css that, at the time of writing, supports 185 languages and 89 styles. I chose this library because, after a quick research, this one appears to have a comprehensive list ...