Sitemap is a list of accessible pages on a website which helps crawlers of search engines to locate and index the pages on a website easily in the search query. A sitemap should be created and submitted for every website and blog and its the duty of the owner of the blo
g to do that as it helps alot in SEO.
For every blogging platform (i.e Blogger, WordPress, Joomla) the method of submitting the sitemap is a bit different but not so much. In this article I will teach how to create and submit sitemap to Google Webmasters Tool for a Blogger blog.
Blogger creates a sitemap for your blog automatically, but the problem with the sitemap generated by blogger is that it only contains the recent twenty five posts of the blog. A perfect sitemap should have links to all the posts of the blog for better indexing in the search engines. There are three main steps first step is to generate a sitemap for you blog, second is creating the sitemap and submitting it into your blogger account and third step is submitting that sitemap again on Google Webmasters Tool.
How to generate the sitemap
Generating the sitemap is very easy as there are many online tools that do the job. The tool that I use for blogger blogs is ctrlq.org. Open the link and enter the full address of you blogspot blog (this applies to both .com domain and blogspot domains) and after that click on "Generate Sitemap" and you got the sitemap for your Blogger blog.
Add sitemap in Blogger robot.txt file
Copy the sitemap generated above and login to your Blogger blog and navigate Setting>Search Preference and next to "Custom robot.txt file" click on "Edit". Click on "Yes" and paste you the sitemap inside it and click on "Save Changes".
Submit sitemap in Google webmaster tools
Last part is to submit the sitemap to Google. For that login to Google Webmaster Tools, select the site that you created the sitemap for. (If you have'nt submitted your site to Google webmaster tools, do that first). Now click on "Sitemap" and then click on "Add/Test Sitemap" and paste only this line "/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500" and click on "Test Sitemap". If every thing is alright and clean. Click on "Submit Sitemap".
All done. Your blog's pages are now ready to be indexed in search queries in Google. Hope this helped you. Leave comment and dont forget to share.
