I’m at a loss to understand why Google isn’t indexing my posts at all. It used to index some of them but since June 2025 it has gradually dropped down to 0. So I changed my sitemap.xml so that it now only lists my longer posts with titles (i.e. my newsletter). I don’t really care about my micro posts being discoverable by search. However, that doesn’t seem to have any effect (yet?). Three of my archive/index pages are showing up as “Redirect Error” in Google Search Console and I have no idea why, but I suspect that this may have something to do with the fact that the pages linked to from those pages aren’t being indexed. The pages in question are:
The problem with proprietary, secret sauce search engines is that there’s really no one who can explain why they aren’t indexing your site. Other than Google themselves, of course. The rest of us can only make educated guesses.
From what I can tell, nothing is stopping spiders from crawling your site and indexing pages. Your robots.txt looks fine, you’ve got a sitemap.xml, and I don’t see any metadata that would prevent indexing.
Google search results are tailored to individuals, but at least for me your site is in their index, though mostly older pages. For example, searching for site:letter.talkaboutbooks.net gives me about three pages of results.
It’s also clear there’s nothing preventing crawling of your site, since new pages appear in other search engines that maintain their own indexes, like Mojeek. For instance, searching for site:letter.talkaboutbooks.net 2025 brings up posts from this year.
While I can’t say for sure, I’d lean toward this being a “Google problem” rather than a “site problem.” Your best bet is probably to keep digging around in Search Console to see if you can figure out what’s going on.