Hidden Blogger tips you won't find on Google

Google does not think some of my posts are worth including in Search.

Cue tiny violin! But this is not a complaint: Many posts here do not deserve to be in Search at all. ¶ 

Still, here are five "shadow banned" tips that I think could be useful to some.

You won't find them in Google Search, at least not today.

The headers, below, are links:

Formatting and images in widgets

It's just nuts that Google removed the formatting toolbar from widgets that used to have them (including the text and HTML widgets). I post the workaround to add boldface, italics, and photos.

Manage your snippet

Improve your home page if your blog theme reduces posts to a blob of unformatted text there.

Think about mobile traffic

If you blog on a desktop, you might have a blind spot about how the blog performs for mobile. This post walks you through a kind of "mobile audit" and outlines some changes you might consider.

Delete Blogger profile (not!)

Exactly what happens if you take Blogger's invitation to delete your Blogger profile, and what reversible steps you could take instead to accomplish the same things.

Protect your blogging account

Precautions to help you recover your account if a hacker or error deletes it or blocks you from accessing it. The catch: You have to do these now.

Why not include these in Search?

Mixed results

Granted, these tutorials are not for everyone. (You could say that about all of my posts here, actually). And Google will steer you to a very good community guide about deleting your Blogger profile, if you ask it.

But for some of these, Google does not provide a better alternatives. Search in vain for some combination of "blogger widget "and "bold" or "format" or "italics"and the closest you get are some off-topic pages about Blogger widgets in general.

A search for "formatting in Blogger snippet" similarly produces results that are all over the map, though one of the first results is a help thread on Reddit where two years ago I posted a link to the same blog post that Google won't index.

(To be fair there are also some technical posts about editing the theme xml to replace the snippet with fully formatted posts. Could be worth checking out if that's what you want.)

No surprise: Google is a mixed bag. Or maybe Google is right and these posts aren't actually useful to anyone. What do you think?

PS

As I said, this is not a complaint. I don't care (much) about being in Search.

But if you want to see everything from me, you can follow or subscribe.

Todays hidden kitten is courtesy of Mikhail Vasilyev / Unsplash.