Google sitemap is necessary for a blog or website which helps search engine crawlers to crawl and index content on your blog easily. The XML Sitemap file is like a directory of all web pages that exist on your website or blog.
Search engines like Google can use these sitemap files to discover pages on your site that the search bots may have otherwise missed during regular crawling.
If you’re using Blogger platform for blogging, you must have noticed that Blogger blogs has an XML sitemap that is automatically created once your blog has been fully setup, which keep updating your new blog posts as soon as they’re published.
Search engines like Google can use these sitemap files to discover pages on your site that the search bots may have otherwise missed during regular crawling.
If you’re using Blogger platform for blogging, you must have noticed that Blogger blogs has an XML sitemap that is automatically created once your blog has been fully setup, which keep updating your new blog posts as soon as they’re published.
The Problem - A complete sitemap file should mention all pages of a site but that’s not the case if your using blogger. The default XML sitemap file of any Blogger blog will have only the 26 most recent blog posts. That is a limitation because some of your older blog pages, may never get indexed in search engines.
The Solution- Here’s what you need to do to expose your blog’s complete site structure to search engines with the help of an XML sitemap. There’s however a simple solution to fix this problem. Follow the bellow steps to configure your XML Blogger blogs sitemap:
The Solution- Here’s what you need to do to expose your blog’s complete site structure to search engines with the help of an XML sitemap. There’s however a simple solution to fix this problem. Follow the bellow steps to configure your XML Blogger blogs sitemap:
Step 2. Enter your blog url/address in the text box then Hit the “Generate Sitemap” button to generate your unique xml Blogger sitemap. (shown in the below screenshot)
Step 3. After clicking the generate sitemap button you will see a sitemap text. Copy the generated sitemap text from the text field-box. As shown in the below screenshot.
Step 4. Now login to your Blogger blog, navigate to Blogger Dashboard and click on “Settings”, now look for “Search Preferences” and click on it, now find "Custom robots.txt" , just click on edit as shown bellow.
Step 5. After clicking on edit you’ll see, "Enable Custom Robots.txt content?" Select Yes and a text field-box will appear just bellow. Now paste the Blogger xml sitemap contents you generated in (Step 3.). After pasting the Blogger xml sitemap contents click on the “Save Changes” button as pictured bellow.
If all the Steps are taken correctly. Google bots will crawl and indexed all your published contents, so you don’t need to bother going to webmasters tools to submit your blog again, all your blog contents would now be indexed and crawled automatically. All you have to do is, write and publish your contents and google search bots will do the rest.
In addition, you can add your blog sitemap to Google webmastertools to see how many your articles have submitted and how many have indexed by Google. Simulate following steps to submit sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools:
· Open Google Webmaster Tools and sign in with your Blogger account.
· Here you will see your blogs. Click on your blog in which you want to add sitemap.
· Now Click on “Optimization” and then Click on “Sitemaps” button.
· Now Paste the below code in the following box if your blog have less than 500 articles.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-result=500
· If your blog articles are more than 500, you can paste another code without removing the previous code.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-result=500
· If your blog articles are more than 1000, you can paste the third code too.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-result=500