Create and Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google and Bing

 

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.

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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.