How to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google (And Why Nothing Happens for 6 Weeks)

You published your first posts. You submitted your sitemap. You verified your site in Google Search Console. And then nothing happened. For weeks.

If you are in that stage right now, this is what is actually happening and what to expect.

The Honest Timeline

Here is what a new blog looks like from Google is perspective over the first few months:

Time since launch	What happens
Day 1	You submit the sitemap. Google acknowledges it.
Days 2-7	Google crawls a few pages. Search Console shows “Discovered” or “Crawled - currently not indexed.”
Weeks 2-4	Some pages move to “Indexed.” Impressions start to appear (usually under 10 per day).
Weeks 4-8	Most pages are indexed. Impressions climb slowly. Clicks are still close to zero.
Months 2-3	A few posts start ranking for specific long-tail queries. First real clicks.
Months 3-6	Traffic becomes consistent. You can see which posts bring visitors.

The silence in the first six weeks is not a failure. It is how Google treats new sites.

Why It Takes So Long

Google has two problems to solve for any new site:

1. Is this site trustworthy?

Google cannot distinguish between a real blog and spam within hours of launch. It waits. It watches whether the site keeps publishing, whether other sites link to it, whether the content is unique, whether users stay when they arrive.

2. Where does this content belong?

Google has to figure out which queries your posts should rank for. That requires seeing how users behave when your pages appear in results. Until those signals accumulate, your pages sit in a holding pattern.

Neither problem is solved by anything you can do in a day. Both are solved by time, consistency, and links from other sites.

What You Should Actually Do

There are five things that matter. The rest is noise.

1. Verify your site in Google Search Console

Go to search.google.com/search-console and add your site as a property. For a pages.dev subdomain, use the URL Prefix method. For a custom domain, use the Domain method (it requires a DNS record).

Verification proves you control the site. Without it, you cannot see what Google knows about your pages.

2. Submit your sitemap

In Search Console, go to Sitemaps and submit your sitemap URL. For most Astro sites, that is:

sitemap-index.xml

Astro generates this automatically if you use the @astrojs/sitemap integration. It lives at sitemap-index.xml, which points to sitemap-0.xml, which lists your actual URLs.

If the status shows “Couldn is fetch” for a few days, do not panic. This happens often on new properties and resolves on its own. The sitemap is a hint, not a requirement.

3. Request indexing for your key posts

In Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool at the top. Paste each post URL and click “Request Indexing.” This moves the page to the front of the crawl queue.

You can only do this a handful of times per day. Spread it out. Do the three or four posts you most want indexed, not all of them at once.

4. Get one or two real links to your site

This is the part most guides skip. A link from another site is the strongest signal Google has that your content is worth indexing.

Ways to get links without spamming:

• Post on Reddit in a relevant community (Reddit links are nofollow, but they drive traffic, which Google notices indirectly)
• Cross-post on dev.to with a canonical URL pointing back to your blog
• Answer questions on Stack Overflow or a forum, and link only when directly relevant
• Comment on other blogs where you have something genuinely useful to add

One real link from a respected site is worth more than a hundred low-quality ones.

5. Keep publishing

Google trusts sites that publish consistently. Ten posts published over three months look more legitimate than ten posts published in a week. If you published a burst at launch, that is fine, but now is the time to settle into a slower rhythm.

One post a week is enough. The point is that the site is active.

What Search Console Will Actually Show You

The “Pages” report has four statuses worth understanding:

• Discovered - currently not indexed — Google found the URL but has not crawled it yet. Normal for new sites. Just wait.
• Crawled - currently not indexed — Google crawled the page but decided not to add it to the index. This is a soft signal that the content is not yet competitive. It usually resolves as the site gains authority.
• Indexed — the page is in Google is index. It can appear in search results.
• Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical — Google chose a different URL as the “official” version. If you cross-post to dev.to and forget the canonical URL, this is what happens.

If a page sits in “Discovered” for weeks, that is normal. If it sits in “Crawled - not indexed” for months, the content probably needs more differentiation or more inbound links.

What Not to Do

These are common mistakes that slow things down or get you penalized:

Do not submit the same URL repeatedly. Requesting indexing once is enough. Repeated requests do not speed up the process.

Do not resubmit the sitemap every day. Once it is submitted, it is submitted. Google will fetch it again when it wants to.

Do not buy backlinks. Google detects them and penalizes the sites involved.

Do not publish AI-generated content at scale. If 50 posts appear in a week and they all read like template output, Google notices.

Do not obsessively check Search Console. Nothing useful changes in an hour. Look once a week.

Do not compare your site to established ones. A blog with 12 posts and no domain authority is not going to rank for “how to start a blog” for a long time, no matter how good the post is.

The One Realistic Check-In

Here is a simple test to know if your strategy is working:

Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google. If results appear, your pages are indexed. If nothing appears, they are not yet.

Do this once a week. That is the only check that matters in the first few months.

The Part That Feels Wrong

The hardest thing about Google indexing is that it takes months to see results, and nothing you do in a single day accelerates that timeline. The sites that rank are the ones that kept publishing through the silence.

If you are stuck in the “Crawled - not indexed” phase, the answer is not a technical fix. It is another post, another link, another month of activity. Boring, but it works.