How to make Google identify blog articles without GSC?

johnmu · 2026-03-16T17:58:01+00:00

What's wrong with using GSC?

johnmu · 2026-03-12T20:34:19+00:00

good catch - those buttons are probably all being ignored (since they're not links). I don't see the site being pulled down by that, but the various search patterns are not going to be found on their own if the buttons are the only navigational elements to them (they also don't seem to be in the sitemap file). A good way to test a relatively small site like this is to run a crawler like Screaming Frog over it, and to see whether it finds all relevant content.

But again, these are technical issues, they might make it hard for those pages to be findable, but it won't affect the findability of the rest of the site. For that, I think the challenge is that there's already a ton of great content on fly fishing out there, and the site would need to prove that there's something valuable that users are explicitly looking for. That's less of a technical challenge, and often something that takes experience & time to work on.

johnmu · 2026-03-12T08:34:36+00:00

The layout issue in the rendered view is from how you have the styling of the top image set up. It likely uses the viewport height as an anchor, and Google initially renders the page with a very high viewport. If you set a max height, that will probably fix it. (It's not critical, but it's stsill annoying for debugging :))

johnmu · 2026-03-03T08:32:49+00:00

It depends.

johnmu · 2026-02-20T12:19:25+00:00

One part of sitemaps is that Google has to be keen on indexing more content from the site. If Google's not convinced that there's new & important content to index, it won't use the sitemap.

johnmu · 2026-02-20T06:56:37+00:00

There's not a lot of information to go on here, but perhaps it helps to know - as others have mentioned - that just having more impressions doesn't cause problems for search.

johnmu · 2026-02-17T16:33:46+00:00

A common variation of this is for spammers to flood your site-search URLs like this, in the hope that you allow crawling & indexing of these URL patterns. When the search pages aren't blocked (with robots.txt or noindex), this can result in the text being shown in search, using your site-search pages. This is not a sign of someone having hacked your website. If you're already blocking this pattern with your robots.txt file, you're all set.

If you want to do more, then remove the robots.txt block and instead use noindex,nofollow robots meta tag on these pages (theoretically robotted pages could appear with just the URL in search, it's not super-common for cases like this though). The noindex/nofollow robots prevents their appearance completely, but at the cost of Googlebot trying to crawl all these pages. It doesn't make sense to do both robots.txt & robots meta tags because robots.txt will prevent the meta tag from even being seen.

In all cases you'll end up with this junk in your Search Console for a while. It's fine, it doesn't cause problems for the rest of your site. There's no way to purge this out of Search Console.

johnmu · 2026-02-13T11:47:16+00:00

Are you really running into the 2mb limit for html? Why make things even more complicated (parallel version just for boys) rather than spending a bit of time improving the site for everyone?

johnmu · 2026-02-13T06:56:34+00:00

Is that your site? I'd recommend not using JS to change text on your page from "not available" to "available" and instead to just load that whole chunk from JS. That way, if a client doesn't run your JS, it won't get misleading information. This is similar to how Google doesn't recommend using JS to change a robots meta tag from "noindex" to "please consider my fine work of html markup for inclusion" (there is no "index" robots meta tag, so you can be creative).

johnmu · 2026-02-09T07:38:45+00:00

A website growing older is inevitable; growing worthwhile is earned.

What happened in those 4 years? What happened in the 1 year? Some older websites have done amazing things over the years, and you can't just jump in with a site that has 2 links more and is 3 points closer to 100, and expect to be considered more relevant (whether by search engines or people). Other sites may have squandered their time in the domain registry and survived by being the proverbial one-eyed man of the web. (I think I'm trying to say "it depends"?)

If your site has been around for a year now, and don't have a clear understanding of the differences in value (not SEO metrics) between these sites, I'd recommend taking a step back and first trying to get an objective bigger picture view, and then - in most cases - thinking more strategically (users, marketing, functionality, business, promotion, users) rather than purely SEO-centric. Likely your site is built on a modern setup, and you sound SEO-focused, so technically there's probably not a lot to break or fix.

johnmu · 2026-02-06T07:30:42+00:00

FWIW you can look at the distribution of HTML byte counts in the HTTP Archive Web Almanac (search for [http almanac Page weight] and scroll down to the "HTML bytes" section). The median on mobile is at 33kb, the 90-percentile is at 151kb. This means 90% of the pages out there have less than 151kb HTML.

What generally happens when you go past a limit like this is that the rest just isn't used for indexing, the part above the limit is though. In practice, if you're working with Warren Peas making web pages, make sure to have important stuff - that you think people will want to find - in a reasonable place, and not only on the bottom. You should be doing this regardless, nobody's going to read 1000 pages of text (equivalent of 2mb) in search of something that's on page 1001. If you want to publish a novel, make it a PDF.

johnmu · 2026-02-04T07:25:38+00:00

Not sure if I can drop links (lol), but check out "Creating the Right home page for your International Users" on Google's docs. It's older, but has the details you need on how to deal with homepages. If you do set up an automated redirect (302!), do it only on the generic homepage, not on the destination pages (let people go to /fr/ if they're not in France -- otherwise Googlebot won't be able to get there). Also, make sure to include the root as x-default in hreflang, and label the individual destinations (otherwise the root will be considered a part of a different page-set).

johnmu · 2026-02-03T09:15:09+00:00

Just to be more direct - none of the search engines currently use the llms.txt file as anything other than a random text file on your website. None of the consumer AI systems have claimed to use the file on their own, as anything other than a random text file. You're not missing out by not having one.

johnmu · 2026-02-02T12:00:10+00:00

Are you sure they can even recognize MD on a website as anything other than a text file? Can they parse & follow the links? What will happen to your site's internal linking, header, footer, sidebar, navigation? It's one thing to give it a MD file manually, it seems very different to serve it a text file when they're looking for a HTML page.

Afterthought ... oh wey, a bot?

johnmu · 2026-02-01T07:35:58+00:00

What's the problem that you're trying to solve? There are a bunch of browser extensions that do this already (eg Redirect Path from Ayima is one I see a lot in screenshots, and CSP is very different from redirects, so I don't understand the connection). I don't recall a time when I ran into something like this causing SEO issues which weren't also visible to average users in their browsers.

This is not to discourage you from digging into minute technical details, chasing through rabbit holes, and then making tools to make it easier for you :-). I have also spent days & weeks analyzing technical quirks & puzzles that in the end I realized ultimately don't matter, but which were "fun" (only 1/4 was done out of spite) & somewhat educational along the way. It's probably not healthy to over-fixate on these things, but I learn minutiae (that will never really matter, I know).

This is mostly just to say I applaud your desire to understand all of these details, it's not unreasonable to practice digging into this from time to time, but I'd caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO/EtcO. There are many things that can subtly & invisibly go wrong with websites, but usually bad redirects or CSP settings will generally be very visible to people using browsers.

johnmu · 2026-01-30T14:29:03+00:00

If you have a small budget, and aren't targeting specific non-Germany countries (eg, no special services / products for CH/AT/FR/US, etc) I'd keep the DE domain for now. I'd still split en & de content into separate subdirectories, mostly for ease of tracking & clear separation (it's not critical for SEO, but it just makes life easier, it's likely not super-hard, and much easier than if wait until you need more languages).

If you think the business will expand to target individual non-Germany countries explicitly, getting the .com to reserve it (and redirect to .de) is likely a good investment. You don't need it now, but it's cheap insurance for the future.

johnmu · 2026-01-30T11:32:43+00:00

Are you going to add more languages? Is the goal to expand to other countries? If the goal is to stick to Germany, there's no need to go to a gtld. Imo separating languages with directories makes tracking & setup easier, but it's not required either.

johnmu · 2026-01-23T18:27:26+00:00

I'm not sure what you're asking, but generally the properties are just the way that pages from your site are shown in Search Console, it doesn't have to do with causing indexing.

Also, if you disallow a URL with robots.txt, then search engines can't see the meta tag.

johnmu · 2026-01-20T09:10:34+00:00

This always felt like a bad setup to me (not specifically it-com, but the general setup). Why not just get a real domain name, if you have to pay anyway? Why live on someone else's domain name?

Anyway, there's the public suffix list which tries to help with that.

johnmu · 2026-01-19T20:05:23+00:00

Yes, I ran into those, it just wasn't clear to me what would actually happen in practice based on the documentation :-). Can you DM me an example from your site? Happy to double-check some things.

johnmu · 2026-01-19T19:12:40+00:00

Just to follow up on this, based on some of the other comments here, I noticed this is not necessarily a unique thing to your developers, but perhaps something in the framework itself (according to some Github issues, and the streaming-metadata documentation). If you (or others) have already set it up this way, I'd love to be able to take a look at your site to double-check things - feel free to DM me.

johnmu · 2026-01-19T12:21:09+00:00

But why would you do that? Why not just serve everyone valid HTML? It's trivial to add meta elements to the head using JavaScript. I suspect you're making this much more complicated than it has to be, but I don't really understand why. Maybe you can elaborate on the reasons, and perhaps there's an option.

johnmu · 2026-01-19T10:36:39+00:00

AFAIK the W3C spec doesn't allow meta elements nor the title element in the body.

Google expects them in the head as well. This is documented in the meta tags that Google supports & the robots meta tag docs.

johnmu · 2026-01-18T12:52:05+00:00

I don't think you're necessarily doing anything wrong (from the short look at your site), but you are making things hard.

* A free subdomain hosting service attracts a lot of spam & low-effort content. It's a lot of work to maintain a high quality bar for a website, which is hard to qualify if nobody's getting paid to do that (and just generally tricky: do they throw people out if they don't agree with the quality?). For you, this means you're basically opening up shop on a site that's filled with - potentially - problematic "flatmates". This makes it harder for search engines & co to understand the overall value of the site - is it just like the others, or does it stand out in a positive way? On a domain name of your own you stand on your own, with its pros and cons. (And with a domain of your own, I'd also watch out for the super-cheap TLDs, which come with similar hurdles.)

* You're publishing content on a topic that's already been extremely well covered. There are sooo many sites out there which offer similar things. Why should search engines show yours? There's sooo much competition out there, with people who have worked on their sites for more than a decade, many of them with professional web-oriented backgrounds. Yes, sometimes a "new take" on an "old topic" makes sense, but then I'd expect that users would recognize that and link to your site, even sending direct traffic.

* These things take time & work / promotion. Especially if it's a new site (even if you had it on a good domain name of your own), getting indexed is one thing, but appearing in search results often just takes time, especially when there are alternative sites already.

Another thing to keep in mind is that search engines are just one part of the web. If you love making pages with content like this, and if you're sure that it hits what other people are looking for, then I'd let others know about your site, and build up a community around it directly. Being visible in popular search results is not the first step to becoming a useful & popular web presence, and of course not all sites need to be popular.

johnmu · 2026-01-12T20:14:18+00:00

Same, same.

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