Google Delayed Indexing of Blogger Custom Domains

I've noticed over the last week and a half, that my posts on my main Blogger blog (which has a custom domain) are not being indexed by Google until several days later. When before, they used to show up within minutes.

What's odd is my homepage is getting crawled as soon as I make a post, only the new posts aren't appearing in the results until about 3 days later.

I'm not the only one that has noticed this either, there is a growing discussion thread in the Google Webmasters Forum regarding this issue.

I'm mainly posting this as a test to see how fast this post gets indexed, but I wonder if you guys are seeing the same behavior?

Update: February 26, 2012 - Well, it seems everything is back to normal and has been for a few days now.  Hopefully it remains this way.

Turn Off Comment Word Verification

One of the most annoying things for me to encounter when making a comment on a fellow Blogger blog is seeing one of these dreaded images:

At least those two examples are somewhat readable, sometimes I get impossibly garbled words, Asian characters, or even musical notes. How do they expect us to be able to reproduce things like that?

It really is a pain, and I hate to say it but sometimes I just close the tab and leave without commenting whenever that window pops up.  I am not alone in this thinking either, just do a Google search for turn off word verification and you'll come up with tons of posts from other people ranting about it.

Do all of your readers a huge favor and disable this bothersome 'feature'.  Read on to find out how.

How To Disable or Remove Blogger's Lightbox Image Viewer

A couple days ago, Blogger decided to implement a new feature for viewing images.  A Lightbox script that shows post images in a slideshow format when clicked.  See here for the announcement:  http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/09/your-images-never-looked-so-good.html

Unfortunately they didn't provide an option to disable this.  Breaking the many blogs that utilize their own image viewing scripts, and also annoying the one's who don't want a script at all.

So until they give us an official way to switch it off, here is a workaround to override Blogger's default Lightbox:

Go to Template > Edit HTML, and paste the following code directly before the </html> tag at the bottom of your template:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById('main').innerHTML = document.getElementById('main').innerHTML.replace("'lightboxEnabled': true,","'lightboxEnabled': false,");
</script>

Update 09/21: The previous fix prevents some other scripts present in the post body from working. Thanks to Mark Greenwood for reporting the issue. Use this code instead:

<script type="text/javascript">
var imgs = document.getElementsByTagName('img');
for(var i = 0; i &lt; imgs.length; ++i){
    imgs[i].parentNode.replaceChild(imgs[i].cloneNode(true),imgs[i]);
}
</script>

Update 10/13:  The above fix is no longer required.  Blogger has added a setting to disable the lightbox in the dashboard under Settings > Posts and comments > Posts

Track Image Search Traffic as Search Engine Hits with Google Analytics

The default behavior of Google Analytics is to treat inbound hits from Google Image Search as a referring site rather than a search engine.  In order to track Image Search traffic as an organic search engine hit, replace your GA script with the one below:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push([ '_setAccount ', 'UA-XXXXXXX-X ']);
      var ref = document.referrer;
      if (ref.search(/google\.([^\/]+)\/(ima?g|.*[?&]tbm=isch|.*[?&]site=images)/i) != -1) {
        var regex = /google\.([^\/]+)\/.*/i;
        var match = regex.exec(ref);
        _gaq.push([ '_addOrganic ', 'images.google ', 'q ',true]);
        if (ref.search(/[?&]prev=/i) != -1) {
          regex = /[?&]prev=([^&]*)/i;
          var match2 = regex.exec(ref);
          _gaq.push([ '_setReferrerOverride ',  'http://images.google. '+match[1]+unescape(match2[1])]);
        }
        else
        {
          _gaq.push([ '_setReferrerOverride ',  'http://images. '+match[0]]);
        }
      }
  _gaq.push([ '_trackPageview ']);
  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement( 'script '); ga.type =  'text/javascript '; ga.async = true;
    ga.src =  'http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js ';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName( 'script ')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

Just make sure to edit line 2 replacing UA-XXXXXXX-X with your own site id.

Now you should be able to track your image search hits by their keywords and have them counted as search engine traffic in Google Analytics.