Submitting Your Blogger Sitemap to Search Console Correctly

A reader sent me a screenshot last month: 212 published posts on her Blogger recipe site, and Search Console reporting 38 indexed pages. She had submitted three different feed URLs, a sitemap from a free generator site and the blog homepage, all as sitemaps. Search Console was not confused by her blog. It was confused by her submissions.

Blogger already builds a sitemap for you, keeps it updated every time you publish and serves it at a predictable address. Submitting your Blogger sitemap correctly takes about five minutes. Getting it wrong, or piling extra files on top, mostly creates noise in your reports. Here is the clean setup, what each status means and what to ignore.

What Blogger Already Generates for You

Every Blogger blog, on a blogspot address or a custom domain, has two sitemap files ready to use:

File	What it lists	Submit it?
/sitemap.xml	All published posts, split into numbered pages for large blogs	Yes
/sitemap-pages.xml	Static pages such as About, Contact and Privacy	Yes
Feed URLs	Recent posts only, in feed format	Not needed
Third-party generated sitemaps	A one-time snapshot of your URLs	No, they go stale

Open yourblog.com/sitemap.xml in a browser to check. On a blog with more than a few hundred posts, you will see an index file that points to several sub-sitemaps. That is normal, and you still submit only the main sitemap.xml address.

The files also update themselves in ways that surprise people. A scheduled post appears in the sitemap only after it goes live, a post you revert to draft drops out at once, and a deleted post disappears without leaving a redirect. If you remove posts in bulk, expect a small wave of not found errors in Search Console over the following weeks. They are harmless, and they fade as Google stops requesting those addresses.

Set Up the Right Search Console Property First

The most common reason a Blogger sitemap shows zero discovered URLs is that it was submitted to the wrong property. If your blog uses a custom domain, the sitemap must be submitted under that domain, not the old blogspot address, because Blogger redirects the blogspot URLs to your domain.

Custom domain: add a Domain property and verify it with the DNS TXT record Search Console gives you, at your domain registrar. This covers www, non-www, http and https in one place.
Blogspot address: add a URL prefix property with the full address, including https and the trailing slash.

Verification usually takes a few minutes for a URL prefix property and can take up to a day for a DNS record to be visible.

How to Submit Your Blogger Sitemap Step by Step

In Search Console, select the correct property and open Sitemaps in the left menu.
In the box labeled "Add a new sitemap", type sitemap.xml and click Submit.
Repeat with sitemap-pages.xml.
Remove any old feed URLs or generator sitemaps you submitted before. Click the entry, open the three-dot menu and choose Remove sitemap.
Come back in two or three days and check the Status and Discovered pages columns.

Before you submit, open Settings in Blogger, scroll to Crawlers and indexing, and check if you enabled a custom robots.txt. If you did, make sure it does not block your posts and that its Sitemap line points to the right address. Our guide to a custom robots.txt in Blogger has a safe version you can copy.

Reading the Status Columns Without Panicking

"Success" means Search Console read the file. It does not mean every URL is indexed. "Couldn't fetch" on a brand new property is very often temporary and clears within a few days; if it persists past a week, open the sitemap in a private browser window to confirm it loads and that your blog is not set to private under Settings, Permissions.

The Discovered pages number should be close to your published post count. If it is far lower on a large blog, open the sitemap index and check that all the numbered sub-sitemaps load. If it is higher, you may have old posts restored from drafts, or posts in other languages you forgot about.

Resubmitting Daily Does Not Speed Up Indexing

A tip that circulates in Blogger groups is to resubmit your sitemap every time you publish, or even daily, to "force" Google to index new posts faster. It does not work that way. Google already rechecks the sitemap regularly, and Blogger updates it automatically, so a resubmission tells Google nothing new.

The other half of this myth is that a submitted sitemap guarantees indexing. It is a list of suggestions, nothing more. Whether a post gets indexed depends on whether it is worth indexing: original, useful, not a near copy of another post and reachable through internal links. Time spent resubmitting is better spent linking your new post from two or three related older ones.

Common Index Reports on Blogger and What They Mean

Alternate page with proper canonical tag

You will see many URLs ending in ?m=1. These are Blogger's mobile versions, and they point back to the main URL with a canonical tag. This status is correct and needs no fix.

Excluded by noindex tag

Often these are label and search pages, which many Blogger templates or custom header settings mark noindex on purpose. Whether that is right for you depends on how you use labels, which we cover in Blogger label pages and noindex.

Discovered or crawled, currently not indexed

Google knows the URL but has not added it. On young blogs this is common for the first few months. Improve the post, add internal links to it and be patient; there is no button that fixes it.

FAQ

No. Blogger has no plugins in the WordPress sense, and you do not need one. Widgets that display a "sitemap page" for readers are a separate thing and do nothing for Search Console.

Should I submit the blogspot sitemap after moving to a custom domain?

No. Submit the sitemap under the custom domain property. The blogspot address redirects there, so a sitemap submitted on the old property will report redirects rather than pages.

How long until new posts show as indexed?

On an established blog, anywhere from a few hours to a few days. On a new blog, a few weeks is normal. You can request indexing for an important post with the URL Inspection tool, but use it for single key posts, not your whole archive.

Set It Once and Move On

Submit sitemap.xml and sitemap-pages.xml under the right property, delete every other submission, and check the report once a month rather than once a day. Note the date you submitted so you can measure progress honestly. Your effort will pay off far more in better posts and stronger internal links than in sitemap tinkering. For more search tips written for Blogger users, visit our SEO for bloggers section.