Create and Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google and Bing
A sitemap is required for helping the search engines' robot crawlers to
easily crawl pages in your site which helps in better index. Each
blogger blogs has an xml sitemap which is automatically created once
your blog has been fully setup, which in-turn keep updating your new
blog posts as soon as they’re published. But it comes with a problem as
though blogger is free but it lacks many features which is necessary for
a blog or website to efficiently run. This default or automatically
generated sitemap only displays a list of first 26 pages of your blog.
That's why you will see that search engines link google only have
indexed 26 of latest posts of your blog. To check what pages of your
site google indexed; simple type
site:youblogslink.blogspot.com or
site:www.yourblogslink.com
(i.e.. site:www.techinfoknow.com) and search on google. It is most
likely you will find only 26 pages or posts have been indexed. For
allowing google’s and other search engines’ crawl and index all of your
posts in your site you need to use multiple sitemaps and submit them
properly in google webmasters and other search engines’ webmaster site.
In this post you will get all the information and techniques regarding
blogger sitemap, use them in the robots.txt, how to submit in google,
bing and other search engine so that all blog post and pages are
indexed.
Blogger’s Default Sitemap
Every blogger blog has default sitemap which is generated when the blog
is created. As I mentioned before, it only allows indexing of the latest
26 posts of the blog. The default blogger sitemap is;
feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
It is same for every blogger blog. Place your blog’s URL with
http://
and a ending
/
(forward slash) before it to see the sitemap. Like; this,
http://www.techinfoknow.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
Replace http://www.techinfoknow.com with your blogs URL. Again it is same for every blogger blog.
Generate Sitemap for Blogger
Now for generating
blogger sitemaps first see what the number of posts
published is. It could be below 26, over 100, over a thousand, may be
over 2000. Why don’t we break the posts number into small segments each
comprising of 500. Now our generated sitemap will be like this:-
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
As the post number crosses 500, we will change the number at
start-index=1 to the starting post number for a new sitemap which will
be used along with the previous one. See the table below;
For Blogs with less than 500 posts |
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 |
For Blogs posts count is between 501 to 1000 |
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 |
For Blogs posts count is between 1001 to 1005 |
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500 |
For Blogs posts count is between 1501 to 2000 |
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500 |
As post number increase and reach a new segment of 500; you need to change the number at
start-index=
, change it accordingly to each 500 segment. Keep the number at 500 in
max-results=500
.
And do remember for each 500 posts, you have to enter a new sitemap, do
not delete the previous ones. Now you have created the sitemaps and all
that is required is to submit them in google webmasters.
Submit Blogger Sitemaps to Google Webmasters
- Go to Google Webmasters.
- You will see a list of all your blogs and website’s that you have linked. Chose the one you want to add sitemaps to.
- Now by the navigation menus on left; go to Crawl > Sitemaps.
- On top right click the 'ADD/TEST SITEMAP' button.
- In the opened empty blank; paste your sitemap(excluding you blog's URL as it's given) and click "Submit Sitemap". Repeat this step for remaining sitemaps until you have finished submitting all the sitemaps that you generated.
- You can and should also submit the default blogger sitemap too excluding the link. It will not create any problem.
Again do remember for each 500 posts, add a new sitemap, do not delete
the previous ones. Google usually takes 1-5 days to crawl and index the
links submitted by sitemaps.
Submit Blogger Sitemaps to Bing
For submitting the blogger sitemaps to bing; In the bing webmaster dashboard go to
Configure My Site > Sitemaps
by using the left navigation menu. You will find a emply box on top of
the page. Paste the link (i.e..
http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
) of your sitemap and click submit.
It should not take long but often in bing you can get frustrated by the
speed o indexing. Bing is not as good as google but it is changing.
Adding Sitemaps to Blogger Custom Robots.txt
Robots.txt contains instruction for search engine crawlers about how to
index your pages. You can add a custom robots.txt to blogger blog by
going to the
Search preferences > Crawlers and indexing > Custom robots.txt
in blogger dashboard. There you can add the generated sitemaps of your
blog. For this just add your blog's URL (like this:
http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/) before each generated sitemap and
put is inside the robots.txt like this.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
Replace
http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/
with your blog's
URL or custom domain URL. As you see along with the default sitemap you
can more. Yes; for adding a sitemap in blogger's custom robots.txt,
just add '
Sitemap:' along with the link to your sitemap. You can
customize or change any part of your blogger blog's robots.txt, to know
how to do this go the following link.
Search Engines May Not Index Sitemaps of Blogger Blogs, Solution is to Ping Them
Search engines like biadu, yandex, and other (even bing, google) still
might know index your blog. In that case you best option is to ping you
sitemap and blog to these search engines. Also build backlinks, submit
each URL of your website individually to their URL submission tool, etc.
will help in you cause. If the above instructions have worked that
avoid pings for google and bing,
Ping blogger Blog's Sitemap to Yandex:
Copy
http://blogs.yandex.ru/pings/?status=success&url=
and paste in your browser and then paste your website sitemap link after it.
EXAMPLE:
http://blogs.yandex.ru/pings/?status=success&url=http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
And for Top level domain:
http://blogs.yandex.ru/pings/?status=success&url=http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
You can also go to
yandex's pinging page for this.
Ping Blogger Blog's Sitemap to Baidu:
Go to
biadu's ping page and paste your website sitemaps link and hit enter.
Ping Blogger Blog's Sitemap to Bing:
Copy
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=
and paste in your browser and then paste your website sitemap link after it.
EXAMPLE:
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
And for Top level domain:
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Ping Blogger Blog's Sitemap to Google:
Copy
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
and paste in your browser and then paste your website sitemap link after it.
EXAMPLE:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
And for Top level domain:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
You can also go to
google's blog search ping page for this.
How all these information in this post helped you blog's SEO. Do share
and if you encountered any problem, let me know via the comments.