After writing blogs for over a month, I checked to see if my blog showed up on Google Search. And... Nothing. So what? Why? How? Why doesn't my blog exist in Google's eyes? So I asked a friend, he asked if I had put my page on the search console. I wondered what that is. Turns out to be the Google Search Console.
I went to https://search.google.com/search-console. It showed me this dialog.
I was supposed to provide the console with the domain I wanted to put on the map, so I typed in this blog's domain in Domain. After that, it led me to the dashboard.
I thought that was it and left it there. The following day, I opened up, and it was still nothing, staring at me like suggesting that I do something. Searching around, they said I need to put in my sitemap so that Google has something to crawl and indexes pages to their search engine. I didn't know what sitemap was. I found a sitemap generator and it gave me this answer.
# Blogger Sitemap created on Thu, 27 Apr 2023 12:15:06 GMT
# Sitemap built with https://www.labnol.org/blogger/sitemap
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://testingguy96.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
I could put this in my blog settings, under Enable custom robots.txt. But I put the xml sitemap in Sitemap as https://testingguy96.blogspot.com/atom.xml. This article told me to also include xml sitemap, as the last one was an Atom one. It was sitemap.xml.
Not wanting to wait for indexing, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I gathered all my post URLs, put each of them to the search bar on top, and requested index manually.
After about 3 days, I checked and my blog and its accompanying posts started showing up. Mission successful! I also learned later that I need to ping Google to submit sitemap again for it to update my sitemap to get new posts, and request indexing for new posts if I want updates right then.
References:
- Blogger blog not getting indexed (More than 10 days already passed after creating)
- Search Console - Best practices for XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds