Did Google Stop Crawling Blogger Blogs on Personalized Domains?

Aug 7, 2008 - 8:26 am 13 by

There are threads at Google Groups and DigitalPoint Forums with multiple reports of Google not crawling Blogger hosted blogs, that are on custom or private domains (i.e. not on blogspot.com domains). Many have reported that the Googlebot crawling has stopped as of July 30th.

I asked Branko to help me see any pattern to the issue and we found a couple things. Both domains listed in the thread have similar patterns.

(1) They both have a robots.txt file that blocks a Google crawer, Mediapartners-Google. Now, we know that Google uses multiple crawlers to index content and they all work together. Branko theorized that maybe that "reduced frequency due to reducing the number of spiders that visit his site." I agree, that is a possibility.

(2) This is more striking to us, is that if you view the source code of both of the reported blogs, you will notice a widget from a script named SetSystemMarkup. I am not sure what that widget does, but in the widget, it has NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW in it. Maybe Google is misinterpreting that as a META tag? I do see that these blogs are both in the Google index, but maybe this is impacting any recent crawl activity for these sites.

I do not think this is a Blogger or Blogspot.com wide issue.

Forum discussion at Google Groups and DigitalPoint Forums.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Bing Ads

Microsoft Advertising Web User Interface Is Currently Down

Oct 29, 2025 - 4:35 pm
Google News

Google Ad Revenue Up 13% & Bing Ads Revenue Up 16%

Oct 29, 2025 - 4:13 pm
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: October 29, 2025

Oct 29, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility Around October 28th

Oct 29, 2025 - 7:59 am
Google

Google Rolls Out Early Access To Gemini For Home Voice Assistant

Oct 29, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Merchant Center Preferred Audience For Promotions Restrictions

Oct 29, 2025 - 7:41 am
 
Previous Story: Google Fixes Search Volume Bug in AdWords Keyword Tool