Got deranked by Google...

Google Search has always been kind of a mystery... go figure.

So as with all the other blogger users, Google Search Console has been reporting Redirect Errors on my site due to Blogger's handling of mobile / ?m=1 URLs.  For more context about this problem, see this page.  I'm pretty sure if any one else has used Blogger with Google Search Console you'll know this issue, so this would be relevant.

Now, since I know that Google Search crawls using smartphone devices, visiting a regular Blogger URL will get redirected to the URL with /?m=1 at the end, which also has a canonical tag pointing to the original URL.  I think Google is treating this loop as redirect issues, and issues a redirect error.

So I tried to request indexing m=1 pages directly, but then Google determined the m=1 page to be canonical even when it has a canonical tag pointing to the normal version of the page.  Well, better than no organic traffic.  I indexed a few important posts this way, and I even had on average 1 click from search per day, excluding my own tests (which I kept track of).

Now Google decided to wise up, figure out that the redirect was normal to Blogger function, and marked my previous pages with "redirect error"s on it with "crawled -- currently not indexed", which is great.  But even after requesting indexing, it is still not indexed...

So whenever Google finally decided to wise up about my site, it just brutally dropped all the pages out of my index, and now I have no search impressions.  (I did click "Validate Fix" on the Redirect Errors, which might've sped up this process)

Not that it matters anyways... it's reassuring to know that Google is crawling the site properly, but now it just decides my site isn't worth the effort to index.  That's partly why I don't care about stats, and just write for myself.