Sitemaps, in simple English, are text files (see example) containing a list of all web pages that exist on your site. It is important that you create a comprehensive sitemap as it will help Google and other search engines crawl your site better and that might mean more traffic coming your way in the long run.
The Problem with Blogger Sitemap Files
Ideally, the sitemap file should contain all URLs of a site but if your blog is hosted on blogspot.com (or if you are using a self-hosted version of Blogger with a custom domain), you’ll be surprised to know that the default sitemap file (see example) contains only the 26 most recent pages of your blog.
That’s a bad thing because some of your older blog pages, that are missing from the system-generated sitemap file, may never get indexed in search engines. There’s however a simple solution to fix this problem.
Generate a Complete Sitemap for your Blogger Blog
Step 1: If you haven’t done this already, sign-in to your Google Webmasters account and add your blog. For details, check this video tutorial on how to add a blog to Google.
Step 2: Once your blog is added to Google, open the Sitemap Generator and type the full address of your blogspot blog (or your self-hosted Blogger blog).
Step 3: What you get is list of sitemap files that contain each and every page of your blog. You now just have to ping Google, Yahoo and Bing to inform them about these XML sitemaps.
As shown in the video screencast below, you need to manually add each of the sitemap files into your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard but for Bing or Yahoo, you can simply click blue hyperlinks and these search engines will automatically download the relevant sitemap files from your blogspot site.
Once all the Sitemaps are added, your Google Dashboard should look something like this.
If you see a red cross or an orange exclamation symbol instead of the green tick, that means something is wrong with your XML sitemap. Verify that the file exists by typing the sitemap URL in your browser.
Sometimes media enclosures (like MP3 files) in blog posts can create warnings during sitemap submission. And if you have switched from Blogger to WordPress, it still makes sense to submit sitemaps of your old Blogspot blog as that will only help search engines discover your new WordPress pages. Good luck.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/submit-blogger-sitemap-to-google/10149/
Tags: Archives, blogger, hacks, Most Popular, screencasts, sitemaps, Internet
Reader Comments
Yahoo gives an error message in the associated CSS. OK for Bing
Written by Ernesto on 10.02.09
This is very useful for those who use Blogger.
I use WordPress and some plugins to get the things done.
Written by Kushagra on 10.02.09
Thanks! But it seems that the Yahoo submission links don’t work.
Gives the error:
“This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.”
Written by Vinayak on 10.02.09
Hi Amit,
Really helpful post. Just one question -
After submitting the generated sitemap (atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500), is it ok to remove the old sitemap (atom.xml?redirect=false)?
Written by Vijeesh on 10.02.09
When I submit to yahoo using your post it gives following error:
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
−
The following errors were detected:
limit exceeded
−
Written by vyas on 10.02.09
Hi Amit, the Yahoo submission gives an error. Thanks for this brilliant tutorial.
Written by Jay on 10.02.09
Thanks for this valuable tip Amit (again!), we all miss out on this usually and always wonder why the pages are not ranking so well as opposed to others (of course there is traffic as well)
Written by Shweta on 10.02.09
Thank you for this.
Written by Faizal on 10.02.09
Hi Amit,
I’m getting
The following errors were detected:
limit exceeded
−
Written by caesar on 10.02.09
Finally an easy way to submit sitemap to Google, Bing .But Yahoo showing “limit exceeded” error is there anyohter way to submit blogger blog sitemap to yahoo . Thanks, this post will be very useful to bloggers.
Written by venkat on 10.02.09
When I submitted to Yahoo, it gives the following error “The following errors were detected: limit exceeded”. Whats the solution??? otherwise, its great….
Written by Vijay on 10.03.09
cant add to yahoo links..i thinks they have assigned a ID shd ping with that…
Written by Josh on 10.04.09
Hello,
very helpful article. everything work perfectly. thank you very much
Written by Maaku on 10.05.09
Wow! You made that easy. I had tried to create a sitemap a few times on my own quite a few times without any success. This time it worked. Thank you very much for a great tool!
Written by Heather on 10.05.09
Very good article i got all my pages indexed.
Written by BharatClick.com on 10.05.09