Blogger rolling out XML Sitemaps

Posted by Unknown on
blogger-xml-sitemap

Blogger is silently rolling out XML sitemaps to all of the BlogSpot Blogs. This is another long awaited feature and as of now, I can see these only on BlogSpot blogs and not on ones mapped to Custom Domains. Blogger has been adding more and more features and this is another really awesome roll out from Blogger.Sitemaps provide information about all the URLs in your Blog. This structured information will give loads of information about your Blog to the Search Engine Crawlers.



What is an XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a XML document which lists all of the URLs on your Blog/Website. This XML document is used by Search Engines to identify and crawl pages on your Website. Sitemaps can have xsl style sheets attached to them but as of now, the Blogger Sitemap doesn’t have any style sheets attached to it.The sitemaps generated by blogger has the url and the last modified date, which will help search engines in identifying fresh content on your blog, crawl and index the same.

How to create a Sitemap for blogger

Just sit back and relax. The Blogger Platform will create it for you. To access the sitemap, jut add sitemap.xml to the end of your Blog’s  URL.You no longer have to add the feeds as sitemaps in Web Master tools.

For Example http://googleblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml will give you the Sitemap of the Official Google  Blog. Since that blog has way too many posts, this URL doesn’t give the actual sitemap but a sitemap index which refers to the actual sitemaps.At the time of making this post, this index has 3 individual sitemaps urls.

blogger-xml-sitemap-index-of-google-blog 

The XML document contains references to three sitemaps, which has details of all URLs on the Google Blog.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml?page=1

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml?page=2

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml?page=23

For Blogs with lesser number of posts(less than 1000), sitemap.xml will give you the actual sitemap.

Example : Official Android Developer Blog - http://android-developers.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

blogger-xml-sitemap-ofandroid-developer-blog

As of now, these sitemaps don’t work on Custom Domains. If you are using a Custom domain blog, you will have to wait a little longer to see the sitemap in action. But you can get a preview of the sitemap if you append sitemap.xml to your Custom Domain Blog’s BlogSpot address.

Adding the Sitemap to Webmaster Tools

Till date,the only way of adding Blogger sitemaps to webmaster tools was to use the Blogger feeds,providing a separate feed for every 500 posts. Once, the XML sitemaps are rolled out, you will no longer have to do all this. Just add sitemap.xml as your Blog’s sitemap(even if it has more than 1000 posts).

We are waiting for the Sitemap rolled out to custom domain blogs. I will write a detailed tutorial on this, once the Sitemaps are official :-)


Update : Blogger seems to have rolled out this feature to custom domain blogs as well. Please refer the updated tutorial on XML Sitemaps for Blogger

Comments

  1. AlexApril 13, 2013 at 2:02 PM

    Will this include pages? One drawback feeds have is they do not include page links, hope this sitemap includes pages too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownApril 13, 2013 at 3:16 PM

      That's the first thing I checked and no it doesn't have pages included. I hope this will be added when Blogger Officially rolls out the new feature :-)

      Delete
    2. RKApril 14, 2013 at 8:32 AM

      I was excited after reading this post. Hence I used the links to check how they function. But, they return me a 502 error. If XML sitemaps is rolled out, blogger and wordpress will be the same and I will be very happy as I have already built my SEO tools too. Eagerly waiting for this wonderful feature.,

      Delete
    3. UnknownApril 14, 2013 at 2:14 PM

      I have updated the post with Screenshots of the Sitemap XMLs :-)

      Delete
  2. UnknownApril 14, 2013 at 11:29 PM

    i change to custom domain and this sitemap dont work. But still work for my blogspot domain

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anil KachhadiyaJuly 14, 2013 at 3:50 PM

      Hello, Please can you tell me how can it works in blogspot.
      i want to add sitemap in my blog.
      Thank you.

      Delete
  3. AnonymousApril 16, 2013 at 9:31 PM

    hi aneesh
    thanks for this tutorial but what about blog with custom domain ?

    ReplyDelete
  4. JimmyApril 18, 2013 at 10:27 AM

    I can see the sitemap for most of my blogs but not on blogs which are on custom domain :(

    ReplyDelete
  5. EfadaBlogApril 21, 2013 at 5:30 AM

    thanks for this tutorial but what about blog with custom domain ?

    ReplyDelete
  6. UnknownMay 3, 2013 at 10:50 PM

    can't wait for blogger to implement xml sitemaps on custom domain..

    ReplyDelete
  7. ManuMay 10, 2013 at 5:56 PM

    Can you please tell me how you are submitting your sitemap to webmasters now. because my sitemap is not updating automatically.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anish PanickerMay 16, 2013 at 10:59 PM

    Currently i am on blogspot... and already submitted the xml sitemap
    will it effect my blog ...... !
    http://malayalamscinema.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anil KachhadiyaJuly 14, 2013 at 3:51 PM

      Hello Dear,
      How you added sime map on blogspot, can you please help me to do this.
      Thanks

      Delete
  9. kamerakuMay 22, 2013 at 8:04 PM

    will that create a sitemap page or post?

    ReplyDelete
  10. NishigandhMay 27, 2013 at 6:21 AM

    Can we creat sitemap which will show images & some text of the post as like page breakup....

    ReplyDelete
  11. DevendraJune 7, 2013 at 11:16 AM

    Nice post ..before i am using atom :) Sitemap.xml is best then any other

    ReplyDelete
  12. vgopalJune 15, 2013 at 9:12 PM

    Thanks for sharing this I want to create a sitemap page for my site not for webmaster, how can this be done?

    ReplyDelete
  13. UnknownJuly 2, 2013 at 1:41 AM

    I've recently changed to a custom domain but I've lost my sitemap, seems I'll have to wait for google to finish their roll out Anybody know when this could be? http://www.vapeyjoe.co.uk/

    ReplyDelete
  14. AnonymousJuly 9, 2013 at 3:14 PM

    My blog(http://teckop.blogspot.com) is showing an error while generating a sitemap at http://ctrlq.org/. Can you please that error for my blog or any suggestion please...

    ReplyDelete
  15. UnknownJuly 22, 2013 at 2:15 AM

    This information was very helpful for my blog http://artsignsymbols.blogspot.com.

    thanx a lot

    ReplyDelete
  16. Adhitya ChandraJuly 22, 2013 at 5:38 PM

    Dude, impressing tips. But, if I just bought a (dot)com domain and applied it on my blogspot blog I could not find any sitemap even a typed myblog.com/sitemap.xml.
    Give me a hand please.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Achmad MuharyaAugust 5, 2013 at 6:30 PM

    so i cant use sitemap.xml on custom domain ?

    well how long i can wait for that

    ReplyDelete
  18. UnknownSeptember 18, 2013 at 4:18 PM

    plz help me its not working...
    www.ritald.blogspot.in for this send me procedure to how to create sitemap

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownSeptember 24, 2013 at 11:33 PM

      what do you see here?

      http://ritald.blogspot.in/sitemap.xml

      Delete

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