How to create a Sitemap for Blogger & submit it to Google Tutorial

WHAT IS A SITEMAP

A sitemap is simply a directory of all the pages existing on your site, like a table of contents showing the structure of your blog. Sitemaps help search engines crawl your site and index it properly. Search engines will crawl your site if you have a sitemap or not, but this makes the process easier and quicker for them.

Bloggers default XML sitemap only shows recent blog posts – which is about 26 posts. We want search engine spiders to know your blogs structure so that they can easily understand and index it.

HOW TO CREATE A SITEMAP FOR BLOGGER

Creating a site map on Blogger is easy, simply add your blog name to the link below.

Blogger – Default URL

http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

Blogger – Custom URL

http://blogname.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

A single sitemap file should not be exceed 50MB which is why we limit it to max results 500. You may need to edit this depending on how big your feed is. Now we’ve to tell search engines that this is your site map. To do this, we add it to your robots.txt file and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.

ADD BLOGGER SITEMAP TO ROBOTS.TXT FILE

Go to Blogger > Dashboard > Settings > Search Preferences and click edit the custom robots.txt file. Click enable and paste the following adding your blogname.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
 
Sitemap: http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 

The above section means that search engines can index your entire site (Allow: /) apart from your blogs search results (Disallow: /search) which is good because that would be considered duplicate pages.

ADDING SITE MAP TO GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS

Now login to Google Webmaster Tools and select your blog. On the left click Crawl > Sitemaps > Add/Test Sitemap. You’ll see your blog name and a text input box, pasteatom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500, test for errors and submit.

Google will now start to crawl and index your site. You can check what pages have been indexed on Googles Webmaster Tools or by going to Google Search and typing “site:www.BLOG-URL.blogspot.com”, “site:BLOG-URL.blogspot.com”, “site:www.BLOG-URL.com” or “site:BLOG-URL.com”. To submit your sitemap to Bing, login to Bings Webmaster Tools, add your URL, verify ownership and then submit your site map. It may take a few days for your site to be indexed.

HAVE MORE THAN 500 POSTS?

If you have more than 500 posts on your blog, you simply submit another sitemap starting at post number 501 for the next 500 posts like so /atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 and continue this depending on the amount of posts you have. So if I had over 1000 posts, my robots.text file would look like this and I would submit the three separate sitemaps to Googles Webmaster Tool.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
 
Sitemap: http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Sitemap:http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
Sitemap:http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500

That's it! Your Sitemap has already been submitted to Google. Wanna submit your blog to Bing to get more traffic to your site? Click here to follow the tutorial.Let me know if this tutorial helps you by leaving a comment below!

Credits to: http://xomisse.com/