How to Index a Blogger Site
Blogger occupies an odd position. It is owned by Google, hosted on Google’s servers, and yet a new blogspot.com blog can sit outside Google’s index for weeks like any other new site. If you are working out how to index a Blogger site, the first thing to accept is that being hosted by Google buys you nothing. Google’s crawling and indexing systems treat a Blogger post the way they treat any other page on the web: discover it, crawl it, and then decide, on their own schedule, whether it belongs in the index.
What Blogger does give you is a platform where most of the technical plumbing is already correct. That narrows the job to four things: one privacy setting, two files Blogger generates for you, and a submission step that Blogger does not do on your behalf.
Check the one setting that blocks everything
Blogger has a switch that quietly overrides everything else you might try. Under Settings, Privacy, there is an option controlling whether your blog is visible to search engines. If it is off, Blogger tells crawlers not to index the blog at all, using the same noindex mechanism Google documents for blocking Search indexing. No sitemap, no submission, and no waiting will get past it.
This is the first thing to check, because it defaults differently depending on when and how the blog was created, and because its effect is invisible from the published page unless you view the source. Turn it on, save, and only then move to the rest of the list.
Use what Blogger already generates
Every Blogger blog automatically serves two files that matter for indexing:
- A sitemap at
yourblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml(the same path on a custom domain). It lists your posts and updates itself when you publish. You do not need to build or maintain it. - A robots.txt that allows crawling of posts and pages while keeping search-result and label URLs out of the way.
The defaults are sensible. The trouble starts when people change them. Blogger’s settings include custom robots.txt and custom robots header tags, and both are switched off for a reason. Enabling custom robots header tags and ticking noindex boxes without understanding them is one of the most common ways a Blogger site removes itself from Google, and a custom robots.txt with a stray disallow rule does the same damage more quietly. If your blog is not indexed and you have ever touched these settings, start there: the patterns are the same ones covered in six reasons Google declines to index a page that looks fine.
One Blogger quirk worth knowing: mobile visitors may see your URLs with ?m=1 appended. These are duplicate versions of the same page, and Blogger marks the canonical version for you. Seeing them in reports is normal and not something to fix.
Ask Google to look
Blogger generates the sitemap but does not submit it anywhere. That step is yours.
Verify your blog in Google Search Console, then submit sitemap.xml under the Sitemaps report. For an individual post you want seen quickly, the URL Inspection tool lets you request indexing for one URL at a time, which Google describes in its recrawl documentation as a request, not a command. Google decides what to crawl and what to keep, and repeated requests for the same URL do not move it up the queue.
Submission is a request, not a result
This is the part most Blogger guides skip. Submitting a URL, by sitemap or by inspection tool, is the first of two separate events. The second is Google actually indexing the page, and the gap between them can be days or weeks, especially for a young blog with few external links pointing at it. A submitted post is not an indexed post, and nothing on Blogger’s side tells you when, or whether, the second event happened.
Because Blogger does not support plugins, tools that assume you can install something are out. This is where a submission tool that works from the outside fits naturally: AIndexify takes pasted URLs or a CSV, needs no Search Console connection, no ownership proof, and no tag in your template, and then checks each URL against live Google results on a fixed schedule. It reports submitted and indexed as two separate events, so you can see which posts Google has actually kept rather than assuming the sitemap did its job. If a post carries a noindex from those custom header settings, the preflight check catches it, marks it Couldn’t check, and refunds the credit rather than billing a check that cannot succeed.
For the broader picture of how discovery, crawling, and indexing fit together, the ultimate guide to Google indexing covers the full pipeline; the Blogger-specific work is genuinely just the steps above.
What to do while you wait
Blogspot blogs tend to wait longer than established sites because Google has no crawl history for them and few signals to go on. The useful work during that period is ordinary: publish posts substantial enough to stand alone, link new posts from older ones so crawlers can reach them, and get at least a few links from outside the blogspot.com domain. Label pages and archive pages will drift in and out of Google’s attention; that is normal and not worth fighting.
Once your posts are submitted, the honest question is which ones Google has actually kept. Submit your URLs and see where each page stands, with dates, rather than guessing from a sitemap ping.