How to create sitemap for Blogger blog

A Sitemap is a list of accessible pages in your website. Sitemaps helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to easily crawl pages in your site which helps in better index. As a blogger you must create a sitemap so whenever you make a new post search engines can crawl and index them easily. In this post let’s see how to create sitemap for Blogger blog and submitting it to Google webmaster tools and in robots.txt.

Default Blogger sitemap

By default your blogger blog will have sitemap, but the issue with that sitemap is it only shows your recent blog posts. A perfect sitemap is that it should contain the list of all you pages so that search engines know the complete structure of your site. Let’s see how to create sitemap for Blogger blog.

How to create sitemap for Blogger

Creating sitemap is very simple and this sitemap works for both self-hosted Blogger blogs and normal Blogger blogs. Just use this
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
next to your blogs URL. For example
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
This sitemap is for 500 posts and pages. But if your blog have more than 500 posts then you have to create another sitemap.
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500

And so on...
Now you have created sitemap for your Blogger blog, but you need to tell search engines about your sitemap so that bots can know your site structure. There are two ways to tell search engines about your sitemap.
1. Adding your sitemap in robots.txt file
2. Submitting your sitemaps in Google webmaster tools

Adding your Blogger sitemap in robots.txt file

Follow these steps for adding sitemap to robots.txt file
1. Login to your Blogger blog
2. Go to dashboard >> settings >> search preferences 
3. Edit the custom robots.txt.

4. Enable and paste the following text and click save changes.
5. Make sure to change your blog name in Blogger sitemap below.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://ewhw.blogspot.in/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

So whenever search engines crawls your site they will access your Blogger sitemap from robots.txt file.

Submitting your Blogger sitemap in Google webmaster tools

1. Login to your Google webmaster tools
2. Select you website.
3. In your site dashboard click sitemaps below.

4. Now click add/test sitemaps, add your sitemap (just the atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500) and submit your sitemap.

5. This sitemap is for 500 posts and pages. But if your blog have more than 500 posts then you have to create another sitemap (just the atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500). and submit your sitemap.

That’s it you have successfully submitted your sitemap in Google webmaster tools. Now it’s ready for crawling and indexing. You can find the number of pages crawled and indexed in Google webmaster tools.

If you like then also submit your Bloggers sitemap to Bing webmaster tools.
Hope this helped you on how to create sitemap for Blogger and submitting it in robots.txt and Google webmaster tools. Please leave your comments below.