The Indexing Problem Every Blogger User Knows Too Well
If you run a blog on Blogger and you have been trying to get your posts indexed on Google, there is a good chance you have run into this frustrating wall. You publish a post, go to Google Search Console, submit the URL for indexing, and then you get hit with a redirect error. Every single time. It does not matter how many times you try, the result is the same.
I went through this myself, and it took me a while to figure out what was actually going on. When I first connected my Blogger site to Google Search Console, Google automatically indexed about three to four of my canonical URLs on its own. That felt fine at first. But when I started manually submitting my other posts, almost every single one returned a redirect error. Not one or two. Almost all of them.
That was when I started experimenting, and what I found changed the way I handle indexing on Blogger entirely.
What Is a ?m=1 URL on Blogger?
Before getting into the fix, it helps to understand what the ?m=1 parameter actually is.
Blogger, the blogging platform owned by Google, automatically generates two versions of every page on your blog. The first is the desktop version, which looks like this:
https://yourblog.blogspot.com/2026/01/your-post-title.html
The second is the mobile version, which looks like this:
https://yourblog.blogspot.com/2026/01/your-post-title.html?m=1
The ?m=1 at the end is a URL parameter that tells Blogger to serve the mobile-optimized version of that page. When someone visits your blog from a phone, Blogger traditionally redirected them to the ?m=1 version automatically.
Now, in a perfect world, Google would always index the canonical desktop version and treat the mobile version as a duplicate. That is what the documentation says should happen. But as many Blogger users have discovered, what the documentation says and what actually happens are two very different things.
Why the Canonical URL Keeps Throwing a Redirect Error
Here is what I believe is happening behind the scenes on Blogger, based on my own testing.
When you submit a canonical URL like yourblog.com/2026/01/post.html to Google Search Console for indexing, Googlebot goes to crawl that URL. But depending on how your Blogger theme is configured, that URL may redirect to the ?m=1 version when Googlebot crawls it on certain devices or under certain conditions. Google then sees this as a redirect and flags it as an error rather than indexing the page.
This is especially common on older Blogger themes or themes that have not been fully updated for responsive design. If your theme is still serving a separate mobile layout instead of a single responsive layout, the redirect behavior remains active and it interferes with how Google processes your submitted URLs.
The result is the frustrating cycle that many Blogger bloggers know well. You submit, you get a redirect error, you wait, nothing gets indexed, you submit again, same result.
If you have been seeing errors like "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" or crawl issues in your GSC report, this redirect behavior is often the root cause. I have written about some of those related errors in more detail, and you can read about how to fix the alternate page with proper canonical tag error if that is showing up in your account.
What Happened When I Submitted the ?m=1 URL Instead
This is where things got interesting for me.
Out of frustration, I decided to try something different. Instead of submitting the standard canonical URL, I copied the mobile version of the URL, the one with ?m=1 at the end, and submitted that to Google Search Console using the URL Inspection tool.
The result was almost immediate. Within a few minutes, Google indexed the page. Not hours. Not days. Minutes.
I thought it might be a coincidence, so I tested it on several more posts. Same result every time. The canonical URL would throw a redirect error and sit unindexed for days. The ?m=1 version would get indexed within minutes.
After doing this consistently across my Blogger site, about 90 percent of my indexed pages are now the mobile version with the ?m=1 parameter. That is not something I planned. That is just what the data showed me worked.
Is This the Right Way to Do It?
I want to be honest with you here because this is a fair question to ask.
Technically, the recommended approach is to always index the canonical desktop URL and let Google handle mobile indexing through its mobile-first indexing system. Google's documentation states that it primarily uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking, but it prefers to discover that through proper canonicalization rather than separate mobile URLs.
So by the book, you should not need to submit ?m=1 URLs at all. The canonical version should be indexed and Google should recognize the mobile version as equivalent.
But here is the thing. Blogger is not WordPress. It does not give you the same level of control over how redirects and canonicals are handled. The platform has its own behavior, and that behavior does not always line up perfectly with what Google's documentation describes. Many Blogger users have reported similar experiences in forums and communities, where the ?m=1 submission simply works better in practice.
This is especially relevant if your blog is struggling with indexing problems. If your posts are sitting unindexed for weeks and the canonical submission keeps failing, trying the mobile URL is a practical workaround that has worked for a lot of people, myself included
If you are dealing with broader indexing problems beyond just this issue, you might also want to check out this guide on why your Blogger posts are not getting indexed because there are often multiple factors at play at the same time.
How to Submit a ?m=1 URL in Google Search Console
If you want to try this on your own Blogger site, here is exactly how to do it.
Step One: Get Your Post URL
Go to your Blogger dashboard and open the post you want to index. Click on "View" to open the live post in your browser. Copy the URL from the address bar.
Step Two: Add the ?m=1 Parameter
At the end of the URL, type ?m=1 if it is not already there. So if your URL is:
https://yourblog.com/2026/01/post-title.html
It should now look like:
https://yourblog.com/2026/01/post-title.html?m=1
Step Three: Open Google Search Console
Go to Google Search Console and make sure you are in the correct property for your blog. If you have not set up GSC yet, that needs to happen first because you cannot submit URLs for indexing without it.
Step Four: Use the URL Inspection Tool
At the top of Google Search Console, you will see a search bar that says "Inspect any URL in your property." Paste your ?m=1 URL into that bar and press Enter.
Google will run a quick check on the URL. Once it finishes, you will see a button that says "Request Indexing." Click that button.
Step Five: Wait
In my experience, the indexed status shows up within minutes for ?m=1 URLs. You can check back using the URL Inspection tool to confirm the page has been indexed.
Keep in mind that Google has daily limits on how many indexing requests you can submit through the URL Inspection tool. The limit is typically around ten to twelve requests per day per property, so prioritize your most important posts first.
What About the Robots.txt File?
One thing worth checking before you start submitting ?m=1 URLs is your Blogger robots.txt file.
Some Blogger users, in an attempt to fix duplicate content issues, have added a line to their robots.txt that blocks ?m=1 URLs entirely. That line usually looks something like this:
Disallow: /*?m=1
If that line is in your robots.txt, it will prevent Google from crawling the mobile version of your pages, which means submitting those URLs for indexing will not work. Googlebot will be blocked before it even gets to the page.
To check your robots.txt, visit yourblog.com/robots.txt in your browser. If you see that disallow line, you need to remove it. You can edit your robots.txt in Blogger by going to Settings, then scrolling down to the Crawlers and Indexing section.
Removing that line allows Googlebot to crawl both the desktop and mobile versions of your pages, which gives the ?m=1 submission method the best chance of working. I dealt with a GSC redirect error that was being caused by a misconfigured robots.txt, and fixing that line made a significant difference. You can read more about how to fix Google Search Console redirect errors on Blogger if you are running into related problems.
Does Having Mobile URLs Indexed Hurt Your SEO?
This is probably the biggest concern people have when they realize 90 percent of their indexed pages are the ?m=1 version. Does that hurt your search rankings?
Based on my experience, no. My pages that are indexed as mobile versions still rank and receive organic traffic. Google understands the relationship between the desktop and mobile versions of Blogger pages. It knows that post.html and post.html?m=1 are the same content, just served differently depending on the device.
Because Google now uses mobile-first indexing across the board, having the mobile version indexed is not inherently a disadvantage. In fact, it aligns with how Google wants to handle content in the first place.
Where you could run into a problem is if the mobile version of your Blogger blog is significantly different from the desktop version, for example if it is missing content or structured differently. But for most standard Blogger themes, the content is identical across both versions, just formatted differently for screen size.
The more meaningful concern is the "Crawled, currently not indexed" status that some pages end up with regardless of which URL version you submit. That is a separate issue related to content quality and site authority rather than the URL parameter itself. If you are seeing that status in your GSC report, I have covered that in detail in this post about the crawled currently not indexed issue in Google Search Console.
When This Method Works Best
The ?m=1 submission method is most effective in specific situations. Here is when it tends to make the biggest difference:
- Your Blogger theme is not fully responsive and still serves a separate mobile layout.
- Your canonical URL submissions consistently return redirect errors in GSC.
- Your posts are sitting unindexed for weeks despite multiple submission attempts.
- You have recently published a batch of new posts and want them indexed quickly.
- Your robots.txt is correctly configured to allow crawling of ?m=1 URLs.
If your canonical submissions are working fine and your posts are getting indexed without issues, there is no particular reason to switch your approach. This method is a practical solution for a specific Blogger problem, not a universal recommendation to ignore canonical best practices.
A Few Things to Keep in Mind
Before you go off and start submitting every URL on your blog as a mobile version, there are a few things worth being clear about.
First, this is based on real experience running a Blogger site and testing what actually works. It is not the approach that Google officially recommends. If you are comfortable with that distinction and you are frustrated with the canonical URL redirect errors, this is a workable solution.
Second, Blogger's behavior can vary depending on your theme, your domain setup (custom domain versus blogspot subdomain), and how your GSC property is configured. What worked on my site may not produce exactly the same results on yours, though the core issue is common enough that the solution tends to transfer.
Third, indexing is only one part of the ranking equation. Getting a page indexed is not the same as getting it to rank. Once your posts are indexed, the work of building authority, earning backlinks, writing quality content, and satisfying search intent is what actually moves the needle in the long run. Google's helpful content guidelines are worth reading if you want to understand what they are looking for beyond technical indexing factors.
Finally
The short answer to the question in the title is yes, you can submit a ?m=1 URL for indexing in Google Search Console, and for many Blogger users, it is actually the approach that gets results when the canonical URL keeps failing.
I did not arrive at this conclusion from reading a tutorial. I arrived at it through weeks of frustration, testing, and paying attention to what Google was actually doing with my submitted URLs. The result is that nearly all of my indexed Blogger pages carry the mobile parameter, and my blog is still ranking and receiving traffic.
If you are stuck in the same loop of submitting canonical URLs and getting redirect errors back, give the ?m=1 version a try. Make sure your robots.txt is not blocking it, use the URL Inspection tool in GSC, and request indexing. In most cases, you will see the page indexed faster than you expected.
Blogger has its quirks. Learning to work with them rather than against them is part of what makes running a successful blog on this platform a skill in itself.
See you in my next post ☺️
