The fellow WordPress.com blogger, Weirdo82, complains that Google hasn’t discovered their site yet. I decided to check what my own presence on Google is with the Google Search Console (WordPress.com’s support doc).

Google knows about my site but sends no traffic, based on ~2 days of data. Google’s knowledge of my site is limited to a very small number of indexed pages. Most posts aren’t there.

Why is that and should I care about it?

• Google ranks sites based on an ever-changing algorithm. When Google started, the top factor for ranking was inbound links – if other sites link to you. This, however, has been abused by SEO experts from day one. People would buy countless assets, use them for linking and rank themselves high with some garbage content. So, Google pushed back by adding more and more factors and so far, the battle is ongoing. They are losing it in areas with a high commercial interest but no brands. Finding a human plumber in Bulgaria with Google is no go.
• Blogs are by nature not great at coming up with unique searchable titles. When I blog about how pretty my cup of coffee was, should I realistically expect to be ranked? Probably not.
• Blogs that are great with titles and topics that Google wants to see are generally unreadable by humans. I see the content written for bots all the time – 3-4 pages long so that it is considered quality content by the AI overlords. It would have multiple headers in the middle, each with a list from 1 to 10 or so. When I see that, I wish I had a block button to never see it again.

Google would send me 100s of hits per day to my former blog but all of these were to 10-year-old posts I didn’t care about. I value one comment on my latest post more than a 1000 of these Google clicks. So the answer is no – for a personal blog, Google doesn’t matter. Optimizing for their ever-changing algorithm would make my site worse.

I care about Google, what do I do

Google’s strategy is to make you pay for traffic, this is what made them so big. They farm people’s desire to be found, to sell products, and to grow. So, what else?

• Bring blogrolls back – exchange links or quotations with people. Google doesn’t mention links as SERP factors anymore but they’re likely still using them
• Write frequently – you never know which cringe post will be ranked and will boost your site by 100-200 views per day
• Buy a domain early and register it for a long time
• Get some social media shares, even if it’s just you sharing your own content. It likely counts.

I would keep acting like Google doesn’t exist for the context of this blog. It would be flattering to have more traffic but I still value human interactions (likes & comments) more than random traffic to old posts. These I get primarily from the Reader, Facebook, and Twitter.