A sitemap is a really important tool for webmasters. It allows a webmaster to generate the entire pages of a website which is pointed out by a single XML file. This sitemap XML file tells search engines about all the pages of an entire website. This allows search engines to crawl through those pages and index them so that they can be displayed in search results. A search engine robot does crawl a website on its own, but having a sitemap will help if it misses any page. A sitemap is highly required for maximum exposure.
Sitemaps are also highly recommended by big search engines such as Google and even Bing. In Google Webmaster Tools as well as Bing Webmaster Tools, there are places to submit xml sitemaps. Then those webmaster tools will display the total links which have been submitted with the sitemap. There is even an option to see the number of URLs of a particular sitemap which has been crawled and listed in for search results.
We cannot upload a custom sitemap XML file to Blogger. This prohibits us from uploading a sitemap that we generate externally on our own for Blogger hosted blogs. So, we have to rely on Bloggers internal features to generate a sitemap. Luckily for us, Blogger or Blogspot sitemaps can be easily generated.
To generate Blogger/Blogspot sitemaps follow these steps:
For *.blogger.com sub-domain blogs
These sub-domain blogs have sitemaps automatically generated. They are available as sitemap.xml. For example: for a blog like http://myblog.blogspot.com, the sitemap is automatically available at:
http://myblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
Just replace myblog with your actual blog address.
Sitemaps for such sub-domain blogs are presented in standard sitemap xml format. It contains information about the link to all the post URLs as well as their last modified date.
For custom top-level domain Blogger / Blogspot blogs
Sadly, for these kinds of blogs, there aren’t any sitemaps available at a location like: yourblog.com/sitemap.xml . But since Blogger has already brought this feature to sub-domain blogs, we might see the same feature being available for top level domain blogs as well.
For now we can use a simple trick to get post urls in an xml format. We get it from the atom feeds of the blog. For a custom domain Blogger, the sitemap will be available at:
http://www.myblog.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
We are using the atom feed as sitemaps. When we view the above URL in a browser we will see it as a feed and along with feeds comes post contents. But for search engines, the sitemap url is just as good. Submit it to webmaster services of Google as well as Bing and see how easily it identifies all the available post urls of a website.
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