Issues with an EU.ORG domain

Hello bloggers...

You may be considering creating an eu.org domain and using the domain for your Blogger site(s). However, you may need to reconsider the issues with the domain, especially the indexing issues. In this article, I will share with you some of the issues based on my experiences with this (sub)domain.

Why do people want to have an EU.ORG domain?

The reason why people want to have this domain is that it is free. Yes, an eu.org domain, or more appropriately a subdomain, is free. You can easily register a new domain by visiting https://nic.eu.org, registering a new free account, registering a new subdomain, and waiting for the domain to propagate. You also need to create a free account in a free hosting service (e.g., HOSTRY), add your eu.org domain, create nameservers, and use the configuration in the eu.org domain provider mentioned above.

Having and using an eu.org domain as a custom domain for your Blogger site(s) may also be "cool". Compare these domains:

1. writingnblogging.blogspot.com
2. fzpulishing.eu.org

Yeah... the second domain sounds "cooler" and more professional, right? In fact, I have at least three eu.org domains, which have been online for several years. Nevertheless, compared to my Blogger site(s), with Blogspot domain(s), my eu.org domain(s) suffer from indexing and discovering issues. I have waited for years now, hoping that one day, some bloggers will discover the solution to these issues. No results, by the way.

The Issues with an EU.ORG domain

All blogger sites with an eu.org custom domain suffer from indexing and discovery issues. I mean this: it is hard for the domain to be indexed, and even if it is indexed, it is still difficult to be discovered by search engines.

EU.ORG Domain Indexing Issue

You can always add your eu.org domain(s) to Google Search Console. I already did it. However, you will be unable to add the sitemaps. It is so because Google can no longer crawl your Blogger sitemap once the custom domain is used. Although you can see the content of https://www.fzpublishing.eu.org/sitemap.xml in the browser, the Google Search Console will not crawl it. No matter how long, the sitemap will not be crawled or fetched by Google Bots.

So, forget it! You write and publish blogs because you want to be read by other people. However, with this issue, unless you provide a direct link to your blog, readers will never find your blog.

I also have another EU.ORG domain site (zainurrahman.eu.org), and I do not use it as a custom domain with Blogger. Instead, I use a paid hosting provider and use the domain as a subdomain of my main domain. I also use my custom PHP-based blogging platform, like WordPress. However, I have not created a sitemap.xml file for the blog yet. So, I do not know whether Google Search Console can crawl that site. Nevertheless, I have added the domain to the Google Search Console and requested indexing of the pages by providing the URLs. The results? Of 5 pages, only 2 are indexed, the main URL and one article's URL. No problems with robots.txt configuration, though.

Remember: These indexed pages are not on Blogger but on paid web hosting.

Many search engines use sitemap files to crawl the blog or website. Thus, this issue can hold your eu.org domain(s) from being crawled and indexed.

EU.ORG Domain Discovery Issue

The next issue is this. Although some pages are indexed, they are difficult to discover by readers because they will not appear on the Search Engine Results Page. Why? Because the title of all of the pages will be replaced with the EU.ORG default title. Look at the following example:

As you can see, although the title of the page also appears, the site's title does not follow. All is replaced by "EU.org: free domain names since 1996. Frustrating, isn't it?

The titles of your webpages are used by the crawlers to identify whether your pages are relevant to the search keywords. Thus, unless readers are looking for "free domain names since 1996," the chance of finding your blog is extremely limited, right?

In conclusion, an EU.org domain has indexing and discovery issues. With these issues in mind, you may want to reconsider your plan to have an EU.org domain and use the domain as a custom domain for your Blogger sites.