Discovery
Google indexing for blogs
A post is indexed when a crawler can reach one address, see the article, and is not told to ignore it.
People say "Google is not indexing my blog" when the post was never at a public URL. It lived in a draft, behind a login, or on a preview domain that tells crawlers to stay away. Indexing cannot start until a stranger, and a crawler, can open the page.
The rest is maintenance. One canonical address, a sitemap that lists the posts you want found, and no accidental noindex on the template. Asking Google to recrawl is a nudge. It is not a substitute for a page that can be fetched.
The path from a finished article to a URL Google can keep
- 1
The post is public on the host readers use. A preview token does not count.
- 2
The address is stable. Changing the slug after you share it creates a second page and an orphan.
- 3
The HTML contains the article, not only a shell that loads the text after a script runs.
- 4
The sitemap lists that URL, and the sitemap itself is reachable.
- 5
The page does not send noindex, and it does not canonicalize to a different post.
- 6
Search Console, if you have connected it, is where you notice coverage problems. It is not where you write the article.
Four states people mix up
- Published
- A person can open the URL. This is your job, and the CMS job.
- Crawled
- Google fetched it at least once. A crawl can end in "excluded" if the page looks empty or blocked.
- Indexed
- Google kept it and may show it. Indexing is not a ranking. A page can be indexed and sit on page eight.
- Ranking
- The page is a reasonable result for a query. That comes from the page being the right answer, plus the site being a place Google already trusts.
Why a new blog stays invisible
- The whole blog is on a subdomain that is still marked noindex from staging.
- Every post canonicals to the homepage.
- The sitemap is a file you generated once, and the new URLs are not in it.
- You submitted the URL and then changed the slug.
