A sitemap is entirely of a great value. It helps the search engine crawlers to crawl more efficiently. That’s mean more indexing rate, more search traffic. In fact, you should create an xml sitemap for your blogger/blogspot blog too.
Let me explain shortly what it is. Sitemap is a simple xml file that contains all the pages of a website sorting by their values. At random homepage gets higher value, and then posts. So the crawlers can set their goal when to comeback and re-crawl it. You can already guess how important it could be.
What’s the problem with default blogger sitemap?
There is a good news. Blogger already has their default sitemaps generated for each and every blog. It couldn’t be that a popular platform like blogger (powered by google) don’t have sitemaps in default. You can check your default one by writing the url like this:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false
But there is a bad news too that actually making this unusable. What? The default one only shows the most recent posts (25 posts to be exact) instead of showing all of the blog. It’s not suppose to happen in xml sitemaps. In fact, if you have older posts that haven’t included in sitemap and not even indexed in search engines, might stay de-indexed all the way.
That’s the main reason behind why we should avoid the default one and choose the one that will support the full site. Unfortunately, the process is not same to the other platforms. In fact, it’s easier and can be done instantly.
How to create the full xml sitemap for blogger?
Method #1: Writing urls
This is the best and recommended method by me. You can’t even think how much easy it could be. The sitemap is already generated by default. Meanwhile, we just need to specify the proper url. And here is how it will look:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
That’s it. You have got your very first sitemap. But there is still a problem. This one will only show max 500 posts (most recent) in your blog. But what if your blog is quite bigger and has more than that?
No worries. There is a solution too. We just need to create multiple sitemaps. It’s fine to use multiple sitemaps for a single blog. So if you have between 1000 posts, you just need these two sitemaps:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
So the first line will generate 500 posts and the second line will generate for another 500 posts. That’s the way it works.
In fact, if you have about 2000 posts for example, you urls should be like this:
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500 http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500
Ah, I think that’s enough to understand how to generate blogger sitemap instantly. You can change the start-index value as per your need. Just make sure you are increasing it by 500. And leave max-results=500 same for all.
When you are done generating links, you need to add them to your robots.txt file. It will help crawlers detect the new sitemaps. So just head over to blogger dashboard > settings > search preferences > custom robots.txt. Make it enabled and add the following lines including your generated sitemap links:
User-agent: * Disallow: /search Allow: / Sitemap: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 Sitemap: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 Sitemap: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500 Sitemap: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500
That’s it. Here I showed how to add multiple sitemaps on robots.txt. That depends upon your post. If you have only one sitemap, just put it on as I showed.
To be more specific, we have already discussed on BloggingSpell about custom robots.txt. You can check this out to understand it even better.
Method #2: Using generators
And what if someone doesn’t want to write urls? They can easily use some tools to generate the robots.txt content directly. There is a lot of them but I found the following special:
- CTRLQ Generator: This tool is developed by Digital Inspiration’s founder Amit Agarwal. You can simply put your blogger blog url there and get the required info. It’s simple and easy. I think you should give it a try.
- MyBloggerTricks Generator: This is another recommended tool that can easily generate you the sitemap. You will be asked to specify your blog and post count, it will create it for you. It can help you to submit it to Google and Bing too.
After you generate the robots.txt content, just like the previous method, go to your blogger’s search preference and add those lines. And I think you will be done.
Wrapping up!
These are the two methods we can use to create blogger sitemaps and add it to robots.txt. In fact, you should add these to Bing and Google webmaster tools too. Simply login to the webmasters area add the sitemaps. Multiples are allowed there. And it will help the search engines to crawl more frequently. Altogether it’s a good practice to improve the crawling rate
I found it useful to share with u at
