I have a cats blog, and I found a short list of sites advertising 'the best cats blogs'. I wrote to them about my blog, and one put a backlink to my blog, which had resulted in search engines actually finding my blog, but just a bit. How do I find a longer list of sites that advertise the best cats/pets blogs? The list I found only ran three or four pages on the net. What words should I write on the search engine? I've tried 'best cats blogs', and 'best pets blogs'.
One way to boost your traffic (findability) is by submitting new posts in Google Search Console. Just submit any new link (or any links of your blog) into the search. It will scan the page and then it will give you the option to index it. It's possible that most of your pages are not even indexed.