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My blogger sites' SEO has tanked, now I know why

Google indexes mobile first, while Blogger has an out-dated approach of redirecting for mobile clients

Google Search Console is reporting that the URLs on my blog are not being indexed due to:

 Failed: Redirect error

The crawler involved is Googlebot smartphone, so it seems that it will be tripping over Blogger's old fashioned approach for handling of mobile clients, that basically involves redirecting the client to specify the URL with a querystring parameter appended to it. As far as the indexer is concerned the URL with the parameter won't be a match for the canonical URL so should not be indexed as representative of the content for the canonical URL.

In the past it may have not been much of an issue as the Desktop crawler would eventually come along to index the site and not encounter the redirection, so the URL requested would match with the canonical URL and it would be a simple one to one mapping for safely indexing the content.

Ironically the Blogger platform is owned by Google, so I would have hoped that they would be able to coordinate for their users' content to be included across their platforms. 

What have we learnt?

Google isn't as complete as other search engines 

These days Google is not indexing content that it used to, so it will be a less complete representation than other search engines can offer. I can find my Blog posts by searching on Bing, but not on Google.

Blogger.com hasn't kept up with Google's changes to indexing strategy

There are several site support pages online that suggest that the redirect situation is not a problem, and can simply be ignored. I believe that guidance is out of date, as over time Google has been favoring much greater weight onto indexing of the mobile view of website content.

How could this be resolved?

Responsive design 

The Blogger platform includes some templates that are designed to be responsive, so that when a mobile client is used to view the page it will be presented with a suitable layout. This should mean that there is no longer be any need to involve redirects for mobile clients when blogs specify such a layout.

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