I posted (manually) yesterday about how many Blogger users, including myself, were experiencing problems when publishing posts or comments.
I’m not sure why this was happening but as a workaround it seems that if you set the date of your latest post to tomorrow’s date this fixes the problem. Thanks to Abandon Skip who posted about the fix on Google Groups.
Over the last few days I’ve noticed that any blog comments which I’ve approved have not been published succesfully.
I posted a topic about this on the Blogger Google Groups yesterday and when checking the publishing trouble group today I’ve noticed a lot of people have the same problem but even worse they can’t publish posts!
Here’s one example:
“For the past two days, whenever I write a post, only the post title
publishes. Everything else disappears. This is true in both my blogs.
When I go back to “Edit Posts,” the text has vanished into
nothingness. It will also not save. Anyone got some insight into this
problem?”
There doesn’t seem to be any feedback from Google about this so far and I’m not sure if it’s affecting everyone, I assume it’s not, but it would be great if anyone has some more information about this. Especially as I don’t expect this post to publish so I’ll have to edit and upload the files manually!
I posted last week about the Blogger <$BlogMetaData$> tag including a noindex meta tag, Adam Lasnik of Google has now confirmed on my original post that this should be fixed.
“Just chatted with the Blogger team, and looks like things should be working normally now. :)”
I’ve just tested this by adding the <$BlogMetaData$> back into my Blogger template and there’s no sign of a noindex/nofollow meta tag this time.
I noticed today that blog.seoptimise.com has been removed from the Google index. The blogs web design was updated earlier in the week and by looking into the source code I found that this was being caused by the Blogger tag <$BlogMetaData$> which produced the sites meta tags including this line of code:
<meta name=“ROBOTS” content=“NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />
Luckily I managed to spot this fairly quickly and hard-coded the generated code instead (without the noindex, nofollow meta tag obviously) so hopefully Google will notice this within the next couple of days. The <$BlogMetaData$> meta tag is used by most Blogger templates and I’m sure it doesn’t normally do this but it’s definitely worth looking out for. Hardcoding this also has the advantage that you can replace the RSS auto discovery tags with your own FeedBurner URL instead of the default blogger XML files.
This is a feature in the new version of Blogger I find quite annoying, when editing an old post it is marked as new and re-added back into the RSS feed. This has happened today when correcting a spelling mistake in my Aviva Directory post.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to prevent this from occurring for edited posts?
The new version of Blogger has now been enabled for users with old login accounts. This was previously available for new users in beta using a Google login account.
My own account has just been upgraded, with my login changing to my Google account. The only noticeable difference so far is that I’m now using post tags which are built into Blogger rather than Technorati but the main change is that the content is now pulled directly from a database rather than being published to the webserver for each new post or update.
I decided to take Rand Fiskin’s advice today and applied a new design to the blog. After failing miserably at making my own customised template I decided to use curves in blue from Blogger Templates. Although this is still a template, it’s not one of the official Blogger designs and is far less common, plus I think it’s looks a lot better too! 
I’ve also made a couple of my own mods to this, such as editing Blogger’s page title and changing the permalink to use the post heading.
I updated my blog a while ago to edit the Blogger titles for SEO reasons. Now after being a bit worried about the number of Google supplemental results being displayed for my blog (although this could be for any number of reasons, especially as the domain is new) I decided to remove the blog title from the page title of all posts.
For example the previous page title for this post would have been:
Internet Marketing Blog: Editing Blogger’s page title for SEO
Now it will instead remove the title and display:
Editing Blogger’s page title for SEO
This is done using the code below and should help the SEO of the blog to use better titles as it will remove the irrelevant title keywords and should also help to make each page appear more unique which I hope will remove the pages from the supplemental index.
<title>
<MainOrArchivePage><$BlogTitle$></MainOrArchivePage>
<ItemPage><Blogger><$BlogItemTitle$></Blogger></ItemPage>
</title>
