Sitemaps are text files containing a list of all pages on your website/blog to show search engines and humans the page structure of your blog. For Google, and of course other search engines to easily crawl and index your blog posts, you have to submit a sitemap(s) of your blog to Google Webmaster Tool. This would help increase your blogs visibility in search engines (not instantly though. I’m sure you already know). Since submitting a full sitemap for my blogger blog, I’ve been getting traffic to old posts that were long buried in my archive once in a while compared to when I was using the blogger feed option (see below). Though not a drastic boost so far, but it’s well worth it.
Blogger default sitemap option is a mess
Normally, if you are hosting your blog on Blogger/Blogspot, you have to submit your atom feed URL as your sitemap, which looks like this;
/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
Unfortunately, the above blogger sitemap only allows submission of 26 maximum URLs at a time. So if you have 100 blog posts, the default atom feed URL will only submit 26 of your latest post to Google in the webmaster tool, and as you update your blog, newer posts displaces older posts to maintain this figure. This wouldn’t show you the exact figure of your pages indexed by Google, so doesn’t quite represent the purpose of a sitemap.
How to Submit full Sitemap for Blogger
To submit full sitemap for Blogger to Google, log in to your Google Webmaster Tool account. Go to Submit a Sitemap and add the following line:
/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
This will submit the first 500 posts on your blog to Google for indexing. If you have more than 500 posts, you have to submit a second sitemap by changing ‘1’ in the link above, to 501, and ‘500’ to whatever number of URLs you want to appear in the sitemap or just leave it as 500, like:
/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
What this figures actually means is, using the first sitemap for example, ‘1’ indicates that you are submitting from the latest (first) post on your blog and the ‘500’ after max-results, indicates that a total of 500 posts from the latest is allowed on the sitemap. If you have more than 500 posts, using the second sitemap for example, ‘501’ indicates that you are submitting from the 501th post, while the 500 shows that you are submitting 500 older posts after the 501th. So two sitemaps above will submit 1000 posts
With this method, you are able to submit your entire blog pages in your sitemap to search engines for faster indexing. This should have a long term effect on search engine traffic to your blog.
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good information. Submitting a correct and optimize sitemap to webmaster becomes very important in order to get optimized SEO.
Thanks for sharing this article.
Thanks For Some Info I Don’t Know Before 🙂
I Already Submitted Site Map 🙂
You’re welcome Osho. I hope you find my future posts more useful.
Thanks for coming by.
I Already Bookmarked Your Blog 🙂
Hope You Will Write More Tutorials On Blogger I Really Like That 🙂
I am grateful to acquire discovered this site. Keep up the beneficial postings.
I really learnt something today.. thanks my master
i have been doing this but the problem is only 26 post have been indexed, i have a total of 42 post.. can u help me to fix this? thanks
Hi Emp,
Since your blog is relatively new, try resubmitting your sitemap more often, like once in two weeks. This will not guarantee an instant indexing but it will help.
Regards
Hi,
Thanks for your response, I already fix the problem…
Nice information. I was searching for this information for a long time and finally got it on your site. Good work.
Thanks for sharing
Thank you for this great tips! However, I just opted for Jetpack sitemap functionality and turned of Yoast sitemap functionality for my website please tell me if I am on the right track.