Blogger Annoyances: Formatting Issues

I've been analyzing visiting patters of this blog, and I noticed that I get a few hits on my posts regarding the Guild Wars Asura mini-pet and Guild Wars: Eye of the North (GW:EotN). I found it peculiar that this post seems to get hits from Google, but my updated post on the topic, which has more substantial information on GW:EotN and Guild Wars 2, doesn't get any hits. In service of those who are looking for information, I added a link to the new post at the end of the old post.

In light of this discovery, I tried to use Google to check if the new post shows up. It doesn't, so it's no surprise why my older post on the matter is the only one being found and read. Regardless, it was kinda weird that the Google spiders were able to crawl the old post so quickly, but not the new post.

I tried to see what was different between the two. One glaring difference is that the old post's paragraph spacing was even all though out the post, while the new post had a different paragraph spacing before and after an unordered list I placed. I already noticed this problem when I first typed the post up, but I thought it was just a temporary glitch in Blogger's display code and that it wouldn't affect the spiders.

Being my only lead, I tried to google other posts of mine with similar inconsistent paragraph alignments. The newest one ain't in google yet, which is understandable sine the post is quite new. The older ones (previous month and older) are googleable. The strange thing is, the very next newer post after the Guild Wars update post was googleable, which means that the older post should also have been googleable by now.

For now, my conclusions are that:
- there is a bug in Blogger regarding posts where images and lists are involved
- the spiders can crawl these pages eventually
- the Blogger bug slows down the crawling process for these pages

As long as I notice that the problem occurs, I'll be doing the following:
- I'll type my lists manually (I won't use the [ul][li][/li][/ul] tags)
- if I use images, I'll remove the "div" tags that Blogger inserts around images

I won't try to fix the older posts, since they seem to be working anyway, but I did do this workaround in the new posts, and I'll probably keep doing this for a while.

Regardless if I'm right about the spiders, I do check the HTML code of my posts in Blogger's composition page before and after publishing. So, if there are any weird behaviors after publishing, and the HTML appears fine in the composition page, the problem is probably not caused by me.

We'll find out soon enough.