Blogger Blog Not Showing Up on Google: The Settings to Check First

A Blogger blog not showing on Google is usually caused by one of five settings: search visibility switched off, a custom robots.txt or robots header tag blocking pages, the blog set to private, a muddled blogspot to custom domain redirect, or no sitemap submitted to Search Console. Check them in that order. If all five are fine and the blog is new, the honest answer is often time: Google can take days or weeks to crawl a fresh blogspot site.

Blogger keeps most of these settings on a single page, so the whole check takes about fifteen minutes. The steps below follow the current Blogger dashboard. Google moves menus around occasionally, so if a label differs slightly, look for the nearest match.

First, confirm whether Google knows the blog exists

Before changing anything, find out what Google has actually indexed, meaning the pages it has stored and can show in results. Type site:yourblog.blogspot.com (or your custom domain) into Google.

• No results at all: something is blocking Google, or it has not found the blog yet. Work through every setting below.
• Some results, but not your newer posts: crawling is slow rather than blocked. The sitemap section matters most.
• Posts appear for site: but not for real searches: that is a ranking problem, not an indexing one. Our guide on posts that are indexed but not showing covers that situation.

The site: search is a rough check, not a full count. Search Console, covered later, gives the precise picture.

Setting 1: Visible to search engines

This is the most common cause on Blogger, and the quickest to fix. Blogger has a single switch that tells search engines to stay away.

1. Open Blogger and select the right blog from the menu in the top left.
2. Click Settings in the left sidebar.
3. Scroll to the Privacy section.
4. Find Visible to search engines and make sure the toggle is on.

Blogger Help describes this option as controlling whether your blog is listed on Blogger and whether search engines can find it. If the toggle was off, switch it on and expect a delay before anything changes. Google has to come back and recrawl first.

Setting 2: Custom robots.txt and robots header tags

Robots.txt is a small text file that tells search engines which parts of a site they may crawl. Robots header tags are per-page instructions such as noindex, which means "do not show this page in results". Blogger lets you override the defaults for both, and that is where problems creep in.

Check the custom robots.txt

1. In Settings, scroll to Crawlers and indexing.
2. Look at Enable custom robots.txt. If it is off, Blogger uses its own sensible default and you can move on.
3. If it is on, click Custom robots.txt and read what is there.
4. Look for a line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: *. That blocks the entire blog.

Blogger's default blocks only the /search pages, which are label and search result pages you do not need indexed. Unless you have a specific reason, the safest fix is to switch custom robots.txt off and let Blogger handle it. Many people paste in a template from a forum years ago and forget about it.

Check the custom robots header tags

1. In the same section, look at Enable custom robots header tags.
2. If it is on, open Home page tags, Archive and search page tags and Post and page tags in turn.
3. Make sure noindex is not ticked for the home page or for posts and pages. Ticking all is the safe choice there.

A noindex on archive and search pages is fine and common. A noindex on posts quietly removes every article from Google.

Setting 3: A private or reader-restricted blog

If only invited readers can see the blog, Google cannot see it either. Googlebot does not log in.

1. In Settings, go to Permissions.
2. Find Reader access.
3. Choose Public. The other options, restricting the blog to authors or to custom readers, keep it out of search entirely.

This catches people who set the blog to private while drafting and never changed it back. It is worth checking even if you are sure.

Setting 4: The blogspot versus custom domain redirect

When you connect a custom domain such as www.yourbusiness.co.uk, Blogger should redirect the old blogspot address to it. Google then treats the custom domain as the real home of your posts. If that setup is half finished, Google can end up confused about which address to index.

1. In Settings, go to Publishing and check Custom domain shows the address you expect.
2. Turn on Redirect domain if you want the bare domain (yourbusiness.co.uk) to forward to the www version.
3. Check HTTPS availability and HTTPS redirect are both on.
4. Visit your old blogspot address in a private browser window. It should land on the custom domain.

If the custom domain shows an error, the DNS records at your domain registrar are usually incomplete. Blogger Help lists the CNAME records it needs, including a verification record unique to your account. Both must be in place.

Common custom domain mistakes

• Verifying the wrong property in Search Console. If your blog lives at www.yourbusiness.co.uk but you verified yourblog.blogspot.com, you are looking at data for an address that now just redirects. Add the custom domain as a property instead.
• Verifying only one version. A Domain property, verified through a DNS record, covers www, non-www, http and https together. It saves a lot of confusion.
• Removing the verification CNAME. Some people delete the odd-looking Blogger record after setup. The domain then stops working.
• Expecting instant change. After a domain switch, Google gradually moves its index across. Old blogspot URLs may linger in results for a while.

Setting 5: Submit the Blogger sitemap to Search Console

A sitemap is a list of your pages that helps Google find them. Blogger creates one automatically, so you only need to tell Google where it is.

1. Open Google Search Console and select the property for the address your blog actually uses.
2. Click Sitemaps in the left menu.
3. Enter sitemap.xml in the box and click Submit.
4. Check the status reads Success after a short while.

Blogger also publishes sitemap-pages.xml for static pages, which you can submit the same way. For a specific new post, paste its URL into the URL Inspection bar at the top and click Request indexing. Our guide on getting new posts indexed faster covers what else helps.

A sitemap helps Google find your posts. It does not oblige Google to index them.

If every setting is correct

Once all five checks pass, the remaining causes are slower to fix. A brand new blog with few posts and no links pointing to it can wait weeks for a proper crawl. Very short or near-duplicate posts may be crawled and then left out. Search Console's Pages report shows the reason Google gives for each excluded URL, which is far more useful than guessing.

For causes that apply to any platform, see seven reasons a blog post is not showing on Google. If you also run sites elsewhere, we have matching guides for WordPress settings, Wix and Squarespace blogs and Webflow blogs.

Where Helio SEO fits in

Helio SEO does not publish natively to Blogger, so we cannot flip these settings for you. If you are moving to WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Ghost or our managed hosting, Helio SEO writes daily posts and submits each one to search engines when it goes live. If your Blogger blog is working well after the checks above, you do not need us for this one.