An addendum on my post on Tuesday...
Is there some circle of hell where Microsoft is better than Google at something? Asking for a friend.
I'm not being (very) facetious, because Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has accepted Parallel Context's sitemap.xml file, but Google has not:
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| Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools... |
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| Google's Search Console... |
I even looked at the XML file just for curiosity's sake and discovered there are so many posts on PC that there's three sub-XML files. So, I tried uploading them directly to the Google Search Console with the same result as you see above. At this point I'm tempted to think that the problem is with Google, not with the XML file. After all, the sitemap.xml file is created by Blogger, not me, and last I checked Blogger is owned by Google.
Oh, and I got yet another response to my request for indexing after fixing my "Redirect error".
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| This came in on September 24, 2025. |
Yeah, right. I followed their analysis tools linked in the help section and discovered that they're being redirected to the mobile version of the website. Yeah, so... There's a mobile version. That's a problem how? If you're running a version of Chrome that is mobile in nature, you're going to get the mobile version.
/sigh
Anyway, I apparently had poor ratings for Accessibility, so I had to change PC's layout to one of the "new" standards, which is a slightly different colored version of the original, and got this:
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| This is for desktop, as of 9/25/2025. |
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| And mobile as of 9/25/2025. Note the comment about redirect in the listing. |
I had to change the mobile settings to show the full website, which I really dislike. The whole point of a mobile setting is to make it easier to read on a mobile device. So after some more tweaking and switching it back to what I consider a "better" mobile setting, I got this:
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| As of a bit later in the morning on 9/25/2025. |
Accessibility went down, but the other scores went up.
Still, there was one last trick to pull off, and one that I'd been meaning to do anyway, which was to change the main art piece.
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| It'll do for the time being. |
However, the result in the tools was a whole lot of "meh"...
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| Well, I like it... |
Anyway, I'm no longer in the red for any of the scores, so I'm going to give it another try.
Google used to keep badgering me about pages not being suitable for mobile users. For a while I tried to do something about it but then I got fed up with it and stopped. I haven't heard anything about it for ages and my blog still appears in search results so I'm not sure what relevance any of this has.
ReplyDeleteYour situation, where PC isn't findable at all on google search, seems extreme. I can believe youmight get blocked because of malware in a link, as you found on your initial investigations but I can't imagine all these small, technical inconsistencies would make any difference to beiing listed. Countless sites must have similar issues. I just checked again and you're still not there, though.
In a way, it's nice to be forgotten, because I'm rather introverted, but I'd rather it be by my choice than some random Google screw-up.
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