In basic terms, a sitemap is a map of a website. In other words, it is a list of accessible pages on a website. Sitemap helps search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo to crawl pages in your websites and index them. New websites that have few backlinks are not usually indexed by search engines unless you provide a sitemap.
In this article, I am going to share you how to create and submit a sitemap for your blog for better search engine results. The default blogger sitemap will only show some of your most recent posts, but for obvious reasons you want all of your posts and pages to be indexed by search engines. Therefore, you need a sitemap that contains the list of all the posts and pages of your blog.
How to create a sitemap for Blogger
It is hard to believe that a line of code is everything that you need. But that is true. It is very simple to create a sitemap. All you need to do is add the following code to your domain.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
For example, the sitemap for this site will be:
https://www.biplavacharya.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Note: This sitemap will only work for 500 posts. If your site has more than 500 posts, then you have to add another sitemap. For example:
For 500 to 1000 posts: atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=1000
For 1000 to 1500 posts: atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=1500
How to add a sitemap on Blogger
- From your blogger dashboard, click settings and then click search preferences (#1 and #2)
- Click edit custom robots.txt (#3)
- Click Yes to Enable custom robots.txt content. Then, paste the following code (make sure you change the domain name) and click Save Changes
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://www.yourdomainname.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Now, whenever a search engine crawls through your site, they will access your sitemap from the robots.txt file and crawl your site accordingly.
How to submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools?
The last step is to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Google search console was previously known as Google webmaster tools. Don’t get confused, they are the same.- Login to your Google search console and select your website. Then, click Sitemaps.
- Enter the sitemap of your site and click submit. You don’t have to type your domain here. Just enter the following code:
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
Now your site is ready for being crawled and indexed. Congratulations!
