Google offers Google Webmaster Tools for webmasters to submit their site to Google as well as get detailed indexing and keyword information. A similar service is also offered by Yahoo! and Bing. These services allow providing a sitemap(s).
Why are Sitemaps Important?
Sitemaps help tell search engines, such as Google, what pages exist in your site and is especially useful for those they might not find a link to elsewhere.
What is the Problem with Blogger Sitemaps?
Unlike Wordpress blogs, which offer a sitemap.xml automatically, the only eligible sitemap available for Blogger powered blogs is its RSS Feed. Unfortunately, the feed only shows the most recent 26 posts. It is important to tell the search engines about all your posts that you worked so hard on, not just the most recent ones.
Fortunately, Blogger sitemaps at “atom.xml” accept parameters which allows a simple solution to this.
Submit the following URL as the sitemap replace BLOGURL with your blog’s URL (such as googleblog.blogspot.com) :
http://BLOGURL/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Unfortunately because the feed cannot exceed 500 posts, when you accumulate 500 posts published, you would need to submit another sitemap replace the ’start-index number’ with 501 (followed by 1001, 1501, and so on).
Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
Note that ‘redirect=false’ is not required if you are not using redirecting feeds to Feedburner.
For example, the Google Blog has over 1500 posts currently, therefore, if you were the owner of Google Blog, sitemaps to submit to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing would be:
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500 atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500
Happy Indexing!
You Might Also Be Interested In:
