A Sitemap is nothing but a list of accessible pages in your website. Sitemaps helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing
to easily crawl pages in your site which helps in better index. As a
blogger you must create a sitemap so whenever you make a new post search
engines can crawl and index them easily. In this post let’s see how to
create sitemap for Blogger blog and submitting it to Google webmaster tools and in robots.txt.
Default Blogger sitemap
By default your blogger blog will have sitemap, but the issue with that sitemap is it only shows your recent blog posts (example).
A perfect sitemap is that it should contain the list of all you pages
so that search engines know the complete structure of your site. Let’s
see how to create sitemap for Blogger blog.
How to create sitemap for Blogger
Creating sitemap is very simple and this sitemap works for both self-hosted Blogger blogs and normal Blogger blogs. Just use this (
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500)next to your blogs URL. See example below.
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Now you have created sitemap for your Blogger blog, but you need to
tell search engines about your sitemap so that bots can know your site
structure. There are two ways to tell search engines about your sitemap.
1. Showing your sitemap in robots.txt file and 2. Submitting your sitemaps in Google webmaster tools
Adding your Blogger sitemap in robots.txt file
Login to your Blogger blog and go to
dashboard >> settings >> search preferences
and edit the custom robots.txt. Enable and paste the following text and
click save changes. Make sure to change your blog name in Blogger
sitemap below.
So whenever search engines crawls your site they will access your Blogger sitemap from robots.txt file.
Login to your Google webmaster tools and select you website. In your site dashboard click sitemaps below. Now click add/test sitemaps, add your sitemap (just the
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500) and submit your sitemap.
That’s it you have successfully submitted your sitemap in Google
webmaster tools. Now it’s ready for crawling and indexing. You can find
the number of pages crawled and indexed in Google webmaster tools.
If you like then also submit your Bloggers sitemap to Bing webmaster tools.
Hope this helped you on how to create sitemap for Blogger and
submitting it in robots.txt and Google webmaster tools. Please leave
your comments below.
