Blogger (blogspot) sitemap is useless and no posts/pages ever get indexed by Google
Blogger (blogspot) sitemap (e.g. https://etlx.blogspot.com/sitemap-pages.xml) is useless and none of the posts or pages get indexed by Google. If your content is not indexed by Google, then it will never be found. It's a serious problem.
How to check if an URL is indexed by Google
Meet Google Search Console (GSC) https://search.google.com/search-console
It's a tool that lets you check if an URL is indexed by Google.
You can request a specific URL to be indexed. So I tried submitting one example page https://etlx.blogspot.com/p/dl.html -- interestingly, it got an error message "Page fetch failed: Redirect Error".
You can request a specific URL to be indexed. So I tried submitting one example page https://etlx.blogspot.com/p/dl.html -- interestingly, it got an error message "Page fetch failed: Redirect Error".
It's a known issue and there are many articles online and even many YouTube videos on the exact topic.
But none of them is offering a clean solution. But I finally found a solution.
The Problem : why Google cannot index Blogger (blogspot) posts & pages
To understand the solution, let's quickly understand the problem. The root cause of the indexing failure is because whenever you access a Blogger URL (e.g. https://etlx.blogspot.com/p/dl.html), it will actually redirect to one of the desktop VS mobile versions of the URLs which append "m=0" or "m=1" as below.
e.g.
Desktop version : https://etlx.blogspot.com/p/dl.html?m=0
Mobile version: https://etlx.blogspot.com/p/dl.html?m=1
They do this "redirection" by sending HTTP 302 (Temporary Redirect) which forces the browser request one of the two URLs, to finally get HTTP 200 (OK) response.
It's the HTTP 302 that causes Google crawler/indexer to fail. Apparently it doesn't like the redirect.
Unfortunately, we cannot disable this redirection. It's a builtin server-side functionality of Blogger.
It's the HTTP 302 that causes Google crawler/indexer to fail. Apparently it doesn't like the redirect.
Unfortunately, we cannot disable this redirection. It's a builtin server-side functionality of Blogger.
The Solution
The simplest solution I found is to request the URL with "m=0" on Google search console. It got indexed almost instantly. Fantastic.
Incidentally, there are many online articles and YouTube videos suggesting you to inject some javascript code in your HTML. I tried all of it and didn't work. As I said, the redirection is the Blogger's server side functionality and cannot be disabled.